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Comment by Osiris | Hacker News Reader

Does it make an actual native app or just a wrapper around a web view? I have a couple of (Android) apps that I use that are clearly just a wrapper and it's really annoying.

1) The back button always exits the app instead of going back a screen as would be expected.

2) Switching to another app and coming back causes the app to reload rather than staying on the screen it was on when I switched out.

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We use webviews, but try to intelligently integrate them into the app.

Things like back button, transitions, caching, and offline mode are designed to work automatically w/ little or no configuration.

Out of curiosity, how hard is it to build something that could parse HTML markup and some CSS stylings and convert that into native views?

Assume that the HTML markup and CSS is all done as per your documentation, so that the parser works as expected every time.

Almost impossible in an automated fashion.

You can extract all of the data but it's very hard to know what links are supposed to do, how pieces of content should be presented, etc.

What if there was a standard created for the markup, so that the parser would know what the links were supposed to do and how the content shoud be presented, because there would be structured data everywhere specific to the parser?

I immediately thought about that after posting, but in reality markup is a clunky and expensive way to dictate this and it would create a lot of waste for something that would be used infrequently.

An interesting idea that comes to mind is the concept of a Mobile Stylesheet / .mss file that would define elements by ID / class and dictate what those elements would represent in a mobile UI. Then you wouldn't have a bunch of needless data-mobile-intent="blah"

That does sound like a good idea, definitely preferable to keep the markup a bit cleaner.

Honestly, I don't know if I care as much for a web-view based product, as Phonegap/Cordova have already been serving that purpose (at least for me), but what you've mentioned, if implemented, would definitely be something I'd use.

As @nkozyra says, understanding what all the links do is hard, however there are automated ways of converting common types of webpage layouts into structure data for native presentation.

For example, our startup (shameless plug) utilizes a computer vision technology to automatically extract structured data from articles, images, products, and videos, etc: http://diffbot.com/products/automatic/. These can then be used to present native-experience views.

Out of curiosity, I'd love to learn more about your stack. Any blog posts handy?

C++/Java/Python and turtles all the way down.

More seriously, as a more researchy/deep-tech startup, most of our stack is homegrown, to address the very specific needs of web-scale machine vision.

I was actually just looking at your startup for an application I'm building. Nice to see you on HN! Do you have an email I can use to ask you about cross-promotional opportunities?

The only reason you are being bitten by those two points is because the developer is being lazy and neglectful of user experience.

Making those two issues dissappear takes about 6 hours of developer time.

I would change hours to minutes.

Nice work, but there is a huge problem and I really hope you fix it ASAP or else I'm SOL for updating the app I just released with this.

Apparently the version numbers are not being increased for each successive build, and you really need to do this. Why? Because I can't even update my app by editing the source code, changing the version number (which is already kinda annoying to have to do) and uploading the new apk release due to it not being signed with the same certificate you guys use....

For reference, here is the app https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.gonative.an... . I added some custom CSS to remove the redundant menus from phones and tablets. Cool feature btw, and nice tool all in all, but the build process needs a bit more thought.

Update: I just went ahead and modified the source. I had to refactor the package name and import R.java manually. Really a bug to have to do, but thanks anyways for the cool service!

Here's the new link, should show up in a bit: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kennyledet...

Thanks for the feedback, and I'm glad to see you published an app! Automatically incrementing the version number is something we are going to do. Emailing hello@gonative.io is the best way to reach us.

Fixed, the Android manifest versionCode now increments with each build.

We do not include the signing key in the source code download, but you can email us to get it.

Unfortunately, phonegap (and cordova) don't make these work by default, and instead make you implement them yourself. Which very few developers get around to doing.

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