Tea round is far too constrained in terms of the inputs (no spaces are allowed) and adding new names / clearing names takes far too long. Not to mention that if you run two ‘spins’ one after another, everyone is still included in the ‘spin’. Mine would be different. So I started to build a skeleton app using javascript and I had it working in an hour or two.

The styling replicates the look and feel of a native iOS app and can also run perfectly well on desktop or tablets.

The end result is an app that looks like a native app; is cached on your device so you don’t need an internet connection – like a native app; and has the same interactions & speed that you would expect from a native app.

So how long before the native app is dead?

Well the only thing stopping it is access to functions within the device itself. Things like the camera (although there are workarounds – see PicUp) or GPS, gyroscope / accelerometer. All you need is a secure API to access that information with the user’s consent (imagine a popup screen similar to the ones you get with Facebook authorisation for apps) and you can say bye bye to a lot of native apps. So how long until this happens? Well, probably a long time.

The app business is worth £billions now so allowing anyone to create their own and not have it pass through an app store (so the creator gets all the money) is unlikely. Also you will lose the curation of apps  so there won’t be any guidelines to adhere to in order to be published. So you could get any old Tom, Dick or Harry publishing a crappy app… like the internet then.

Really though, everything is eventually going to be web based. So it’s just a matter of time.

Check it out

Have a look at the app on your phone or tablet (or even in your browser) and use it.

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Topics covered are things such as graceful enhancement and graceful failure, designing specifically to allow access on various mobile browsers and adding enhancements to the site to improve user experience on the desktop browser or to allow them to fail gracefully so as still accessible on the mobile platform.

Doing this has inspired me to design a mobile specific version of my own website. Now while I would (ideally) like to create a version that is designed for all mobile platforms, I think I will start with just the iPhone.

Step one is already complete! Which is to say I have set up craigmdennis.com/iPhone/. Really tricky stuff…

The next step is to set up some kind of automatic detection and redirection to make sure if people using an iPhone access my site, they get taken to the iPhone specific version.

There are several tricks and treats (pardon the Halloween pun) available when designing a site for the iPhone that allows for the use of certain javascript functions to make use of the touch screen and the orientation detection. Something that means you can even show completely different content when the orientation of the iPhone changes. A great tutorial from Engage Interactive shows what is needed to do just that.

So I am designing a basic UI to navigate to the various sections of my site: Portfolio, Blog, Photography & CV. I want to make sure of the iPhone style photo navigation but that will be a little later on. I can’t decide what to do for the blog section and whether to have a list of titles, titles and descriptions or just the most recent post.

I also have to figure out how to turn off the iPhone redirection when linking to the ‘normal’ version of the site.