It's a web view and it's an amazing hack to make a web view almost "feel" native but it fails. It doesn't fail nearly as hard as the Netflix app, but it's still not the greatest experience. If it wasn't for the fact I get push notifications I would probably uninstall it.
When will people learn that using UIWebView's and faking the experience of native is only a 90% solution? Sure if gets you there quickly but it will cost you trying to hack around the bugs and edge cases to have an almost barely acceptable user experience (and most of those issues are often solved for you for free in the native toolkit).
It's just generally a bad idea to write apps like this.
Now when it comes to pure web apps, I hold out hope that we can have great experiences everywhere. I don't believe anything and everything needs an app (content, books, business websites, etc). That is were the mobile web fits in. But please don't try to use these kinds of frameworks wrapped in a UIWebView and try to ship it as a cough native cough app.
This quote fits so well for these kinds of apps:
“ The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time. ” - Tom Cargill
Is it just me, or do the notifications only work when the device is not locked? If I lock my device and I get an email, it doesn't vibrate and show me the notification. Either that or notifications aren't consistently sent.
I think that there are times when HTML5 apps wrapped in UIWebViews make a lot of sense.
To me, I would rather spend a small amount of time getting a HTML5 app out on BOTH iOS and Android to test an idea or concept. If the app on either platform looks like it has some traction, then I'll take the time to write a native app for that platform.
This line of thought definitely does not apply to this Gmail app. I also wouldn't recommend it for anything remotely resource intensive, but the vast majority of apps are not.
The new version of Sencha Touch (version 2) is very well done. It has a steep learning curve, but I think its worth it to be able to quickly throw together an app that works on both iOS and Android to test a product idea.
Since gmail is just email and already available over IMAP. I don't think they should be forcing consumers to use their gmail app just to get push. Even yahoo mail supported push on the first iphone via the built in mail app.
So far the gmail app isn't really offering anything compelling over the built in mail client. E.g. I don't think labels are a compelling reason to use a whole other application, that's a poor user experience, both options should be available, either as a separate app for those that don't use the built in mail app, or enabling push on their existing service so users aren't forced to tap around to another app just for another inbox.
If we're going to go about ransoming push notifications for a whole separate app, then I'd just scrap all of those separate apps and install Prowl (which interfaces with growl, so when growl receives a notification, it's pushed to your iOS device.) Prowl is a small price to pay to side-step this business strategy b/s.
It's a web view and it's an amazing hack to make a web view almost "feel" native but it fails. It doesn't fail nearly as hard as the Netflix app, but it's still not the greatest experience. If it wasn't for the fact I get push notifications I would probably uninstall it.
When will people learn that using UIWebView's and faking the experience of native is only a 90% solution? Sure if gets you there quickly but it will cost you trying to hack around the bugs and edge cases to have an almost barely acceptable user experience (and most of those issues are often solved for you for free in the native toolkit).
It's just generally a bad idea to write apps like this.
Now when it comes to pure web apps, I hold out hope that we can have great experiences everywhere. I don't believe anything and everything needs an app (content, books, business websites, etc). That is were the mobile web fits in. But please don't try to use these kinds of frameworks wrapped in a UIWebView and try to ship it as a cough native cough app.
This quote fits so well for these kinds of apps:
“ The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time. ” - Tom Cargill