maemo.org - Talk - View Single Post - BBC News iPhone apps now available

	ysss	2010-07-23 , 16:44
	Posts: 4,384 \| Thanked: 5,524 times \| Joined on Jul 2007 @ ˙ǝɹǝɥʍou	#16

Originally Posted by flareup

the iphone has a browser, and most sites have mobile versions, or are more and more being designed with these in mind (a case of point being the recent disasterous relaunch of the bbc news site itself). So what exactly does an 'app' do in these cases?

I'm no expert on this, but I think they do it for 2 things...

1. Control:
- Access just for end users and not aggregators
- Better potential to monetize (targeted ads, subscription models, etc)

2. Usability:
- Optimized batch download + offline access(useful if you're in areas with spotty connection or for airplane ries, makes it quicker to go through a bunch of articles too)
- Optimized UI\UX (easier content consumption, less fighting with navigation schemes)

Obviously these apps come in different quality. So there are good and bad apps. The BBC app is pretty meh.

The better apps make it quicker to go through the headlines, find and read thru the articles you're interested in and to save/share them.

if this is so, why can't we (900/810/800) users access these sites/streams/whatever that the 'app' is accessing?

Personally, I think most of those sites will slowly abandon their bite sized proprietary apps and move to html5 implementation once the mobile browsers support it.

Originally Posted by attila77

Because there is no guarantee that an iPhone-oriented HTML5 site will render equally well on MeeGo (note that under MeeGo I don't necessarily mean just handhelds). Add to this the dance around Flash, WebM/H264 and it's Internet Explorer all over again.

If that's the case, then it's definitely a step back. I don't know why you'd make that assumptions though.

Certainly, but it's a step back. It has been a long and arduous fight (and not even completely over) to get the web to be resolution/aspect/DPI independent. Instead of truly addressing the problem of new form factors, we are simply discarding what has been learned with the web and going back to square 1, brute forcing the problem with specialized versions - a path that cannot be pushed on the long term.

Those are two separate issues.

Force feeding desktop websites (without modifications for handheld friendliness) for sub 4" screen consumption is an ergonomic abhorrence.

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Last edited by ysss; 2010-07-23 at 17:06.

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