My previous post took a high-level look at HTML5 vs. native for mobile apps, concluding that HTML5 is ready for prime time but not necessarily for everyone. I also mentioned some of the work I did in order to get my app, Pints, to perform acceptably. Commenter Jouni (thanks for reading!) wondered about the details: what did I try, and what seemed to work?

I won’t claim to have used an incredibly rigorous process. As previously mentioned, I chose Sencha Touch as my framework almost exclusively based on its performance. At least on iPhone, I threw out PhoneGap in favor of a lightweight custom Cocoa wrapper. (I’m particularly skeptical about whether that ended up mattering, but it did allow me to create a better experience during app load by waiting until the page finishes loading before fading in the WebKit view.)

Inspired by Thomas Fuchs’ “Making an iPad HTML5 app & making it really fast,” I then did the following: (more…)

In my last post I compared frameworks for building app-like mobile experiences with Web technologies: Sencha Touch, jQuery Mobile, jQTouch, and Titanium Mobile. For my own app, Pints, I went with Sencha Touch. But in truth there isn’t a clear winner: for a simpler, more page-based app I’d probably go with jQuery Mobile. (David Kaneda wrote a nice comparison of jQTouch and Sencha Touch — both of which he created. Much of what he says about jQTouch applies equally to jQuery Mobile.)

Each of these frameworks can help you toward the same goal: a cross-platform, native-like experience built on Web technologies. The fundamental question is: is that goal realistic? My answer is a qualified yes. (more…)