

Shell Apps And Silver Bullets - zachwill
http://sandofsky.com/blog/shell-apps.html

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xkcdfanboy
Call it what you want but the web is a way better development environment for
UIs than anything else. If the device isn't mobile, speed isn't an issue. The
only reason web apps are lackluster now is for speed reasons. I have developed
my companies app in HTML5 for the iPad using Phonegap. Speed is good on the
iPad 3 but alpha layers had to be turned off because the blending put too much
strain on the processor/gfx card. Also transitions are a bit iffy, glitchy,
and not as fast as I hoped they could be. However, when I run my app straight
from Safari or Chrome on my Macbook, super fast, almost insane speed, and the
webkit transitions look damn nice, on par with most things I've seen from
Cocoa and Windows UI Animation toolkits. The reason why HTML apps are so slow
is because these engines were built originally for static pages, the codebases
can't instantly be transformed to be super optimized for dynamic, animating,
heavily sized, heavily routined(setTimeout) content but they have been
releasing a lot of performance updates so things look optimistic for HTML
apps.

