Last week I warned that we’d be hearing more about how Flipboard pulled off their new web app and how some would agree and disagree with how they went about it.
Well, my boy Faruk Ateş weighed in:
Flipboard is a product focused heavily around text-based content, which is why it’s so deeply regretting that Accessibility was thrown completely out the window by the engineering team.
As has John “my site isn’t even responsive” Gruber:
You may disagree that 60 FPS animation and scrolling is important. That’s a perfectly valid opinion — but it’s an opinion that is falling into antiquity. iOS raised the bar. We expect not just smooth scrolling and animation, but perfect animation and scrolling.
This won’t be the last link from my site to discussions about this. I’m really hoping that by discussing it on the web at large there is a middle-ground that can be reached. A middle-ground where a “web app” produced for desktop and mobile browsers can actually be, at least from a speed, animation, and scrolling perspective, a first class citizen on a phone. We need to get there. The web absolutely needs to run better on phones and tablets than it does now. We shouldn’t always have to default to building an application for these platforms.
This whole thing with Flipboard will shake out one way or another but my biggest gripe with the Flipboard team was the terrible video promoting it.
See also a recent discussion I was part of on Twitter with a few fine folks.
Side note: I only make fun of John because I like him. Also, this.