A couple of months ago, Amazon released a web based kindle cloud reader. The app targeted iPad customers. For it to deliver a experience similar to the native app, they used HTML5 markup and API available in mobile safari.

Then, you have Financial Times delivered an HTML5 based app (with great success). This app targeted at their readers that use mobile devices (tables and smartphones) to consume content. One more point for HTML5.

Finally, Slideshare ditched flash and “went HTML5″. As a result, making presentations available in mobile devices and ditching flash overall. It took them 6 months, however presentation now load 30% faster and now web crawlers can read them.

The question is: should you follow Amazon, Financial Times and Slideshare lead ? If you are in the gaming business no (at least until WebGL gets better). However, if you are a provider of content that your customers will consume through reading: Yes. Why? Because you already have web developers that work with your current offering. Your current dev staff already knows the product, customers needs and are up to date with product development. Plus with HTML5 you can target iOS devices, Android phones and tables.

If you go native, you will have to, either hire a new developer or current staff will need to learn a new craft. If you go with new devs they will need to be incorporated in the product development process and will need to do this for each platform you want to target. Having your current web developers learn another craft, will make them neglect their current work in exchange of learning a new craft, and they will never be as good as somebody that has been doing it for years.

For  startups that have a web offering of their product or service is that it enables them to develop a mobile app at lower cost. Using frameworks like jQtouch, Sencha or jQueryMobile you can prototype fast and see what works and not. Then when you have more resources and your customers require it, then you can switch to native.

In summary:

• Apps that require graphics and processing power, have a lot of user interaction or needs to access the camera: go native
• Apps that provide content, have simple forms or provide web: go web
• If most of your visitors use modern web browsers that support HTML5 technologies, then consider what you can implement from HTML5 that will enhance their experience: go web
• If your like netflix: that is another story.

Universities and corporations develop software with a “hangover” (of classical concepts) from the days of punch cards and mainframes. Today we don’t need to control computer resources, since they are widely available. The access to information about programming is available on the instant and to anybody with access to Internet. However, universities still teach concepts that where design to control scarce resources, when there not scarce anymore. IT departments still try to use these concepts, to manage the projects and comply with internal politics.

There is a belief that everything needs a project plan, progress reports, Testing Procedure Specification (TPS) documents to make sure that everything is on budget. I find it ironic that we spend money on making sure we don’t go over budget. What is the point of writing stuff that nobody is going to read.

Cure for the hangover? Embrace chaos! Give some liberty to people to work without reporting or detailing everything. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter how you did it, the point is that you did it right.

Like my mom used to say:

All roads lead to Rome

Just because is different, doesn’t mean is good or bad, the point is to get where we want and on time.

I had a window, which contained two form panels. One of the panels was collapsible (similar to this) and after some upgrades it top working: the collapsible button will disappear after collapsing the panel. After Googling and not finding nothing I decided to do a detail trace of the problem using firebug. While observing the HTML tab in firebug, I saw that the problem was in the margins of the form-panel after it collapsed. For some reason the margin was set to 0. So, to fixed the problem I did the following:

Added in the the application CSS file. What this does is sets the width of the collapsed panel to 15px (or 17px in the case of IE), instead of 0.

.x-layout-collapsed{
    width:15px !important;
}

.ext-ie .x-layout-collapsed{
    width:17px !important;
}

So, if you have a similar problem, check with firebug what is the width of the margin of the container i.e <div>. If it’s 0 then just overwrite the default CSS of Ext.