Call me back when every phone runs Cocoa apps.
I said it in my post and I repeat it here: I truly love and believe in web technologies! I'm just saying they're still far behind native frameworks and that it's very hard (if not impossible) to reach the smoothness of native apps today, especially on mobile.
It's definitely possible to reach something "good enough" pretty quickly (made http://dribbble.deaxon.com in a few hours, check it on your iPhone) but I want people to be pragmatic and stop saying you can build the exact same apps with both technologies, because that's simply not true today.
That's it! ;)
Also, that Dribbble app is great. Nice work.
I'm dismayed that I haven't heard anyone else ask it before, although I'm not sure you share my motivations in your posing them. That is, I get the feeling that the subtext of your comment is that you'd conclude that we'd end up with something basically the same as we have now; my claim is that we wouldn't, and what we could come up with has the potential to be so much better than HTML+JS+DOM+CSS.
It's straightforward to come up with alternate designs that don't have a formatting emphasis, and which resemble roguelike interfaces. It's visually less appealing than the web, but offers faster, simpler development and has less tooling overhead for clients.
Coming up with something visual is a tough problem space and I don't have strong mental pictures of alternatives. But it's still a thought experiment that keeps me interested. You're the first person I've run into to complement it as a thought experiment. If you'd like to swap ideas send me an email (from profile). Maybe I'll write up some ideas and you can send feedback.
> I don't want to install an app for a one-time hotel room reservation
Most of my time spent on my phone is spent doing mundane things, like using wikipedia or making hotel reservations. I would rather not use an app for these things, and would gladly sacrifice a bit of usability for the convenience of not having to leave the web browser.
