
BBC News iPad app re-done in HTML5 - jamesgpearce
http://whitherapps.com
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jacquesm
Anybody that plans a business on a mobile platform based on app sales should
take note of this, even if it isn't there yet I really think that it is the
future. We've already seen this movie before, and if google docs is possible
on a desktop/laptop + serverfarm you really have to wonder how long it is
going to take before history repeats itself and 'apps' will go the way of a
large number of desktop applications that are now 'web-apps'.

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maxklein
You forget that 'apps' started off as web-apps in the first iphone, and
neither the users nor developers liked them, so the SDK was released.

The future lies in thicker clients, particularly for mobile where the internet
is not as assured as on a desktop.

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stevanl
Considering most of those thick mobile applications would rely on the internet
for one reason or another, it's not wrong to assume that web-apps could take
the reign in the future. After all, HTML offers more capability now than it
did back when the iPhone was released.

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arethuza
I've been doing a fair bit of development with jQTouch, jQuery, offline web
apps and the SQL database engine accessible from JavaScript in Safari and it's
a pretty sweet combination.

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revicon
Looking at the way the proxy was created on the Nginx server, it seems he's
created an open http proxy that's asking to be abused. Anyone could make a
curl request to that /apps/bbc-news/proxy uri and pass whatever URL they
wanted to hit via the x_bbc_url http header. Doing this, any request they make
would appear to come from the whitherapps.com (or whatever) domain. I can see
the 4chan guys having a field day with this posting spam to boards their own
IPs have been banned from. Seems like the server should only allow http
proxying to a white list of domains, or better yet, a white list of urls.

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jamesgpearce
Yeah - you're right... I hadn't expected this little experiment to hit Hacker
News in quite the way it did, so the proxy is getting locked down.

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shortformblog
You've gotten pretty far with this, and for that it's worth commending. Nice
job. I look forward to seeing a polished version of this. You should offer it
up to the BBC. :)

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jamesgpearce
Thanks. Stay tuned. I'm actually waiting for a Cease & Desist letter from them
;-)

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masklinn
Q: why not do an offline application? As far as I can tell, you don't talk
about manifests and "offlining" it as if it were the normal BBC application.
Any reason?

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jamesgpearce
I will put a manifest on it, for sure... and the AJAX-stuff is cached via
localStorage, so that already gets offline-ness

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alexbosworth
Html5 on the ipad is still wishful thinking by people who don't want to bother
being an ios developer. This demo is clearly worse than the BBC app and i have
yet to see an ios web app that doesn't feel hacky and make me wish for a
native version.

In a couple generations when mobile CPUs are faster and ipads have more than
256mb of ram, we will see a repeat of the web app takeover that occurred on
the desktop.

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tomdale
Have you guys seen the HTML5 version of the NPR app? The scrolling is actually
smoother in the web version.

<http://touch.sproutcore.com/npr/>

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extension
After trying to use that on my ipad for five minutes, I lost count of the
obvious bugs. And no, the scrolling is not faster.

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lecha
NPR app was put together quite quickly and was intended by it's authors as a
demo of though capabilities of www.Sproutcore.com

Let's not miss the larger point here. HTML5 have become a real option of
application development. A business that relies on mobile/tablet form factor
should seriously consider HTML5 as the application platform. The cost of
porting iPhone/iPad apps to Android phones/tablets is much less with HTML5
than with native code.

Lack of distribution and monetization of HTML5 apps doesn't need to be an
issue. A web app can be embedded into a native app to be sold on the AppStore.

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fortes
I love this type of stuff. The project I'm working on right now is all about
having a better experience than the iPad magazine apps, while using HTML/JS
instead of proprietary tech.

Here's a video demo of some of the layout, for the curious:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pt2iJZGqMpw>

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daleharvey
I was surprised when I was checking caniuse.com today that cross origin
requests were supported pretty much across the board.

Is there a reason you couldnt use them? <http://caniuse.com/#feat=cors>

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jamesgpearce
The server needs to know what to do with them. Since I am only writing a
client here, I can't do the server-side piece of the preflight checks etc

Also the service needs to have a particular user-agent to work, so the proxy
doubles up as a rewriter for that.

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abbetts
Html/js is good for some UI parts of an app but eventually makes one yearn for
native threading/locking, queueing, posting notifications, for that last
10-20% of code.

