An average US adult spends 3 hours and 15 minutes on their smartphone every day. This means that launching an app of your own is a great business opportunity. However, you need to decide whether you want to develop a native or a web app. The difference boils down to the fact that web apps run through a mobile browser and native apps are full-fledged programs. Each option has its pros and cons and can be successful under some circumstances. To make the right decision, you need to understand which solution will work the best for your targeted audience.Web App: Pros, Cons, and Considerations...

The web is dead. HTML5 is the be-all end-all of the future. Users are spending more time on apps and less time on the web. You can do anything on the web that you can in a native app. Yawn. Here’s how I feel whenever I hear/read anything about the overplayed “Native Versus Web” argument:It’s not an either-or decisionWhy aren’t we still arguing over “Print vs Digital”? Well, because (most) people understand that each medium has its place in this world, and as it turns out, they can compliment each other quite nicely. Direct mail, magazine ads, et a...

Takeaway: Ryan Boudreaux looks at some of the latest reports on how users are spending their time on the web. Keeping an eye on trends is one way for web developers to stay current.Recent figures in Internet activity include several interesting trends, including:the number of smartphone-user adoption ratesCyber Monday sales figuresmobile banking app usagesocial networking on mobile social mediahours spent onlinesearch habitsTrends in worldwide Internet activity may or may not translate well into changes and updates to an organization’s web development and design plans. As a result, many...

I had an interesting conversation with a friend the other day. She wanted to try putting together a weekend "hackathon" just to see what we could build. It would be one of those fun things where we just start tinkering and see what comes out of it.Somehow, this conversation got to the topic of libraries, programming languages, and frameworks. Then it got a little weird.I guess the current "shiny" thing is still more-or-less Ruby, and particularly when used with Rails. Oh, I suppose there's also the whole node thing, in which you write things in Javascript and run them server-side with v8. ...

Dave Winer: Why apps are not the future:The great thing about the web is linking. I don’t care how ugly it looks and how pretty your app is, if I can’t link in and out of your world, it’s not even close to a replacement for the web.Let’s set aside one thing right away. The browser is an app. Text editors, outliners, and web servers are apps. And, without them, there’s no web at all.Somebody has to write these things. That implies APIs and more tools that are also apps. It implies an entire ecosystem of apps that are absolutely vital to the web.I think Dave is...

I believe that unless your application meets one of these native application criteria, you should not create a native application, but should instead focus on building a mobile web application. Like I said before, I’m a big fan of native applications and I feel that there are a lot of great innovative and market opportunities here, but mobile web apps are the only long-term viable platform for mobile content, services, and applications.Native applications don’t service the user better in any significant way; they only add cost to your project, decrease your distribution channels,...

It seems like web app security has entered the public conscious recently, probably as a result of the press covering the activities of groups like Anonymous and incidents like security breaches at several CAs. Here are a couple of quick security tips to improve the security of your web apps. Think of these as low-hanging fruit, not as a substitute for thorough analysis of your app’s security. If there’s interest in this topic we can do more posts, too - let us know in the comments!Prologue: SSLYour app already forces all traffic over SSL, right? If it doesn’t, it should. T...

Michael Braude decries the popularity of web programming:The reason most people want to program for the web is that they're not smart enough to do anything else. They don't understand compilers, concurrency, 3D or class inheritance. They haven't got a clue why I'd use an interface or an abstract class. They don't understand: virtual methods, pointers, references, garbage collection, finalizers, pass-by-reference vs. pass-by-value, virtual C++ destructors, or the differences between C# structs and classes. They also know nothing about process. Waterfall? Spiral? Agile? Forget it. They've n...