HTML5 vs. Native Applications, The Presentation

By Zach Leatherman | Published: March 5, 2011

This slide deck was prepared for my guest lecture at the University of Nebraska-Omaha’s spring course on Mobile Application Development (BSAD 8916-005). The course was developed in partnership with Google’s University Relations program and included a variety of business and management students with limited programming experience. My lecture was approximately six weeks into the course, and the students had already developed a few simple Android applications. My task was to convince them that HTML5 and Web Development is a viable alternative to native application development, for most use cases.

(I appreciate the irony of sharing these slides using the flash plugin)

If there’s demand, I do have a video of the talk. Let me know and I can do a bit more work to package the video and upload it.

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  • About the Author

    Zach Leatherman is a Professional Front End Engineer. He loves building for the web, and has been contributing to the community through his blog since February 2007. Despite his propensity for software, he has a Bachelors degree in Computer Engineering and is currently on the User Experience Team at Union Pacific Railroad. The views expressed on this website do not represent the views of his employer.

    He enjoys spending time with his beautiful wife Traci and their two Great Danes, Roxie and Ella. They also have a cat, a rabbit, goldfish, and one or more tarantulas. Read more »

7 Comments

  1. Gabe Kangas
    Posted March 5, 2011 at 4:21 pm | Permalink

    Awesome! I ultimately believe HTML5 based apps will win over time, but we need a hook to camera hardware much like we do with the HTML5 tie into location services. I think that’s when the tides will turn.

  2. Zach Leatherman
    Posted March 5, 2011 at 5:23 pm | Permalink

    Yeah, eventually vendors will start to implement the W3′s Capture API, but until then it looks like PhoneGap has pretty good Camera support (docs here).

  3. Sunny Singh
    Posted March 6, 2011 at 8:51 pm | Permalink

    Totally agree. I hate seeing so many sites have an “iPhone app” when all they really need is a mobile version. Do I seriously need to download an app to read blog posts?

    Of course native apps do offer more features at the moment, like notifications. I do hope we will be able to do more on mobile browsers in the future though.

  4. Jozz
    Posted March 10, 2011 at 11:34 am | Permalink

    Great slide set, it’d be greatly appreciated if you could add the video too!!

  5. Casey
    Posted April 27, 2011 at 3:02 pm | Permalink

    Great slide set, thank you. Dealing with similar issues and decisioning currently and would love to see the video if possible.

  6. Rick
    Posted November 16, 2011 at 7:40 pm | Permalink

    Adding a video could have been better, anyways great info here.

  7. DINING CHAIR MAN
    Posted November 20, 2011 at 6:09 am | Permalink

    This is very interesting since I haven’t encounter the HTML5. I look forward to see the video of the talk so I can fully understand it. And the slide set that you have presented was really good.