[REBOL] Re: [native-UI] What's native?
From: greggirwin:mindspring at: 22-Jun-2004 9:10
Hi Carl,
CR> But, at least for now, most people are not switching between
CR> platforms on a regular basis, and those people expect an app to
CR> behave the way they're used to at the widget level.
....
CR> Still, if developers are moving to the browser as the interface of
CR> choice, the platform you're running on might begin not to matter
CR> too much.
I'm glad you said "at least for now", because I'm not really worried
about "now"; I'm thinking about the future. Compare today's browsers
and HTML with where they were when they started. Browsers definitely
changed what people considered acceptable app design. In the early
90's, the UI gurus said 80% of people were happy with an app's
performance if the next screen was displayed (completely) in 2 seconds
or less, and these were rich UIs; after 2 sec's, performance
acceptance dropped off pretty fast -- 4-6 second delays are death for
desktop apps.
Ed said: "Besides the look & feel issue, many /View widgets are not as
rich nor as easy to program as those of HTML."
And many HTML widgets are not as rich or easy to program as native
widgets. :)
For me, REBOL isn't about going head-to-head against other apps in the
UI feature set, it's about creating better UIs that are compelling and
that will be accessible to people who take their stuff with them,
running it on whatever machine happens to be available.
We may also want to consider what happens in scenarios of server
rendered application bits. Let's learn from the morass of browser in
compatibility issues that led to so much logic checking which browser
you're running in, so you know what to do.
-- Gregg
