Now I’m a proponent of native software over web, and have been for a long time. My reasons have long been straightforward.
1. The user experience is much better.
2. The dev frameworks and experience are much better.
3. I don’t have to soil my hands with JavaScript on the desktop.
Points 1 and 2 are regularly eroded, to the point where it’s becoming interesting to me again. Point 3 is, alas, going in the wrong direction, with JavaScript now the Lingua Franca of the web. It could have been VBScript, so we should be thankful for small mercies.
I decided to rewrite an old silverlight app in HTML5 this weekend. This was partly due to a jab from someone at work (it’s an internally facing wiki I wrote a few years ago), and partly due to it being an excuse to try out Angular JS – an MVVM framework for HTML5 app dev. I’m seriously impressed. It’s a really smart script and moves all the templatibg you normally do server side using frameworks like Razor to the browser.
The best thing about it is how little JavaScript I needed to write to do it. I rewrote my silverlight app, front end and back in less time and much less code, and the result is much more responsive. The downside is that most people at work use primitive outdated browsers like IE8 which my beautiful flexbox layouts will not tolerate. So before release I may need to wire in some feature sniffing and write some facetious comments people using backwards browsers.