Ubuntu HTML5 SDK

http://developer.ubuntu.com/apps/html-5/

by Sami_Lehtinen • 13 years ago

155 49 13 years ago

developer.ubuntu.com

sandstrom• 13 years ago

Firefox OS, Chrome OS and now Ubuntu throwing their weight behind HTML. Nice!

Curiously, iOS have sort of taken the other path, beginning with only HTML apps and then drifted away somewhat.

jacob019• 13 years ago

Who needs portability when you run fast and have achieved critical mass? Firefox OS, Chrome OS, and Ubuntu are all linux with tiny market share. I don't see many benefits for Apple.

dynamic992• 13 years ago

The benefits would be more developer-geared rather that beneficial for Apple.

adamnemecek• 13 years ago

Even though it's probably not very popular, HTML + JS is also the preferred (only?) way of writing Metro apps for Windows.

kevingadd• 13 years ago

Not only in any fashion (.NET and C++ are still supported) but yeah, they do have a very strong dev pipeline for HTML.

tonyedgecombe• 13 years ago

It certainly isn't the only way and I'm not sure it's the preferred way.

T-A2• 13 years ago

"write apps that will run on the next million phones"? A rare case of modesty or just a typo?

Tloewald2• 13 years ago

Million is probably immodest too. Whoops, i think apple and samsung sold a million phones just then. Oh that's silly, it takes them a day or two to sell a million phones.

schmichael3• 13 years ago

Why would anyone use this? Are there any consumer Ubuntu phones in existence? Is there any evidence there ever will be?

I use Ubuntu on desktops and servers, but I've seen no reason to expect Ubuntu to gain any traction on phones.

themodelplumber• 13 years ago

Is there any evidence there ever will be?

Yeah, I think the story was posted here recently. They signed somebody but can't say who it is yet, just that they're "big". There were some hints that the appeal had to do with Android being a big deception built around the "open" concept.

schmichael3• 13 years ago

That doesn't sound like evidence. That sounds like vague marketing hype.

T-A2• 13 years ago

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57615107-94/ubuntu-touch-os...

It's not clear to me why they'd want to keep the manufacturer secret.

Tloewald2• 13 years ago

Put it this way -- it runs on just as many good cellphones as firefox os and you can use it to write desktop apps that will potentially work on mobile. I imagine that at some point a dominant HTML5 wrapper for OS level functionality will become ubiquitous, doesn't really matter whose it is.

schmichael3• 13 years ago

I'm not sure what your point is or how it relates to my questions. Why would anyone use Ubuntu's SDK instead of Firefox's or a cross-platform HTML5 SDK?

collyw• 13 years ago

Well they made a mess of their desktop moving to Unity (in my opinion). Hopefully it works better on mobiles.

xfour• 13 years ago

Performance and access to the internal SDK seem to be what ultimately kill this approach. Seems like this happens at the beginning of every product cycle.

So we've got this decent platform, we build up HTML apps that end up kludgy compared to IOS or Android native, so you do a 180 and release the official SDK and everyone migrates over; or your product never reaches mass adoption and dies.

Also, ChromeOS and FirefoxOS are browser's so of course they have a vested interest in making their apps in HTML / JS.

sirkneeland2• 13 years ago

"Also, ChromeOS and FirefoxOS are browser's so of course they have a vested interest in making their apps in HTML / JS"

Isn't that the point of those platforms?

sirkneeland2• 13 years ago

Is this really the correct interpretation? Ubuntu IS releasing a native Qt/QML SDK... they're not going HTML exclusive here.

erikpukinskis3• 13 years ago

So we've got this decent platform, we build up HTML apps that end up kludgy compared to IOS or Android native

People say this all the time, and it makes me wonder if I'm living on a different planet than them. I can see some places where native is better:

* A camera app, or a guitar tuner... something that requires access to special APIs. Making that in HTML would be a kludge.

* An app that's targeted at tech people, who want to feel like they're living in the future, and who need to have have fancy transitions and animations and subtle 3d effects.

But in my experience, the vast majority of apps do NOT require those things. Most apps are just buttons and pages and pictures and videos, and for that kind of stuff, I honestly don't see what the advantage of native is over HTML.

Maybe it's because I am an interaction designer. In my experience, the interaction design in most apps, native or HTML, is seriously lacking. It seems like almost no one actually tests their product with actual people. And it seems like very few developers are actually willing to build the dozens of prototypes that are required to iterate through a design in order to get something that actually works well.

And so we end up with all of these native apps that are supposedly "not kludgy" because they have native widgets and 3d animations, but actually are extremely kludgy in that everything you do in them is a pain in the ass.

But again, I hear people ring the native app bell over and over again like it's some major design issue. So maybe I'm just living in a different world.

Arnor2• 13 years ago

How do you feel about native vs HTML5 for applications that need to do a lot of timing? From my perspective setInterval and setTimeout seem pretty kludgy.

Also, I'm really interested in what you mean by "the dozens of prototypes that are required..." If you're talking about building several prototypes of the same feature to compare and contrast, would you mind sharing the tools/workflows you use for this?

Zigurd• 13 years ago

Most apps are just buttons and pages and pictures and videos, and for that kind of stuff, I honestly don't see what the advantage of native is over HTML.

This is true for very simple apps. But native platforms have developed UI conventions that should be followed for non-trivial apps, and modularity capabilities that should be exploited. Taking Android as the example:

Fragment is the way Android apps scale between small and large displays, and how such apps are modularized.

ActionBar is how commands for fragments are added to "global" UI elements as the Fragment objects appear.

The Share action is how data is moved in the highest-level, user-directed way; Intent and startActivityForResult is how apps borrow UI and capabilities from each other; bound service RPCs is how apps can call each other's APIs. You can't do that with Web apps.

Android arguably has a more powerful feature set for modularity and inter-app cooperation that has been held back from achieving its potential fro users because too many apps started with a Web app or an iOS implementation. Android also has UI conventions that are sophisticated and good-looking and that users will increasingly value apps for adhering to.

frozenport• 13 years ago

>But in my experience, the vast majority of apps do NOT require those things.

If you are making a service like Cherry (On-Demand Car Wash) then you need to maximize the responsiveness of the app. HTML still can't do this although HTML->Native could. On the other hand many people want to write new functionality.

HTML is restrictive and results in a subpar product. You get easier development, but its not time saved if you need to redo all your work.

Frankly, if your requirements fit into HTML the your app probably sucks! :-)

dwild2• 13 years ago

It's funny, I can't see a world where native isn't better.

The performance is still affected even for simple apps and even if the CPU can handle that degradation, the battery won't. If the application does something, it will take more CPU time and this is bad in ANY way. Why wasting theses CPU cycles? Only because you are "more productive"?

Second argument, security. Inject JAVA into a live app, not impossible, but hard. Inject HTML, easily done... When will we start to see XSS on our applications? HTML5 is literally an eval on every single text field...

Third argument, HTML5 is fantastic? Then use it, nothing stop you. There's multiple way to do it currently, the JS api on Android is complete, you can do anything you want. If the platform doesn't support HTML5, then you can start an open-source project or even a commercial project that will allow it. If we start from the HTML5, you won't be able to go native from that point, you directly block possibilities only because you prefer HTML5.

Facebook tried the HTML5 for their apps, the performance was awful and it wasn't a complex app at all.

sp332• 13 years ago

Do these APIs cover similar ground as Firefox OS's APIs?

daker3• 13 years ago

You need to use Cordova 3.3.x https://cordova.apache.org/announcements/2013/12/16/cordova-...

mjp94• 13 years ago

I can't help but feel that this will turn out the same way as how HTML5 is used on mobile phones for native apps right now, where your app ends up not looking native to any of the devices, despite the benefit of one code base for the app.

Danieru• 13 years ago

Of course it will! This is Cordova, the same Cordova as used on BB10, Android, and iOS. This is less webapps and more html stuffed into a native app.

This should not be mistaken for something akin to FirefoxOS. Full disclosure: I've dabbled in systems programming on both Cordova (for BB10), and Gecko. Cordova is but a crude approximation to a proper web environment. Long live Gecko!

navs• 13 years ago

Wondering how this stacks up against Sencha Touch?

voidr• 13 years ago

This is just a Qt SDK and a tutorial on how to write a WebView app. It's like opening up Android Studio/XCode and adding a WebView.

I would have expected to see something where I only write HTML/JS.

Ubuntu HTML5 SDK

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