HTML5 vs. Native Applications, The Presentation

March 05, 2011 🇺🇸 USA

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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Zach Leatherman is a builder for the web at Font Awesome and the creator/maintainer of Eleventy (11ty), an award-winning open source site generator. At one point he became entirely too fixated on web fonts. He has given 84 talks in nine different countries at events like Beyond Tellerrand, Smashing Conference, Jamstack Conf, CSSConf, and The White House. Formerly part of CloudCannon, Netlify, Filament Group, NEJS CONF, and NebraskaJS. Learn more about Zach »

7 Comments

Gabe Kangas Disqus
06 Mar 2011

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.
Zach Leatherman Disqus
06 Mar 2011

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).
Sunny Singh Disqus
07 Mar 2011

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.
Jozz Disqus
10 Mar 2011

Great slide set, it'd be greatly appreciated if you could add the video too!!
Casey Disqus
28 Apr 2011

Great slide set, thank you. Dealing with similar issues and decisioning currently and would love to see the video if possible.
Rick Disqus
17 Nov 2011

Adding a video could have been better, anyways great info here.
DINING CHAIR MAN Disqus
20 Nov 2011

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.