What if the windshield fogs over at a critical moment during your trip???

Well being a white surface on which the projection would be even more visible I'd be pretty damn happy I had an IR view of the road ahead instead of nothing at all!!

I would of course run the defroster rather than rely on the video for long...

If iTunes isn't real money, then why is PayPal real money?

I regularly get iTunes gift cards at a discount off face value, so do lots of people.

Meanwhile whoever gets discounts off the money they send through PayPal? I think there's on introductory credit for getting a PayPal VISA, and that is it.

That's why I say iTunes is less like "real" money to people, because you can load it up at a lesser expense than using real money.

But none of that affects the application developer, they get the same amount on their end...

Why is Google Docs better, at least in principle, than Microsoft Office? Because I can use Google Docs from Windows, from Linux, from Mac, from FreeBSD, from Android, from Tizen, from Blackberry, etc... etc...

The thing is, people don;t have Windows AND Linux AND a Mac...

The have a small number of devices, and if the data can be read on one and worked on on the other, good enough.

That is true of most people, and why web apps have not mattered that much.

After some thought I think Glass is a really bad idea for driving. Having the screen floating in your vision reduces what you can see in the same way a really badly place side pillar in the car can... I guess we can call it the G-Pillar.

Infrared cameras at night and in fog, anyone?

I would LOVE to see that.

But, as a projection overlaid on my windshield, or at least a pretty large projection on the bottom of the windshield. Or even in the large screen embedded in my dashboard that highlights heat sources.

Having a small floating screen that kind of messes with your peripheral vision is NOT the best way to deliver IR video feeds from the front of your car.

It's only a click to install an app too. Only there's a whole lot more web you have to fight for attention against, and more things that can go wrong in the process of delivering a web app to the user. Bad WiFi day for the user? A small hiccup in an app install, but it makes your web app look like garbage.

For instance, Safari on iOS won't let you access the user's system logs (which other apps might occasionally write personal information to) but the containers that run native apps do.

That's not true, what you can do is query the logging system

While it may seem a fine distinction, you are still working through an API. A native app doesn't have "much less restrictive access" to the OS, it just has BROADER access.

Pretty much all of the untethered jailbreaks have come from holes in Safari - not native apps - because Safari actually has lower level access into the system in terms of running a more powerful javascript engine.

For one thing, this applies only if your web application uses a "page" model, not an AJAX model.

No, then it's even worse, because you are not obviously going to a new page, but you get the same annoying delay as if you had...

The same thing can happen if your native application's version control server or backup server gets hacked.

Come on. It would have to be hacked, then a change made with no-one noticing, then it would have to go out to the app store in an update. It's farcically far-fetched and even if it did happen, still would take a LONG time to reach users because someone would still have to submit it to the app store... it could take months.

If iTunes isn't real money, then why is PayPal real money?

Because there are several orders of magnitude more people that CAN AND WILL pay you via iTunes instead of PayPal. I've used both systems. PayPal is great from the standpoint of being able to get you money but it's way more of an obstacle to the user than in-app purchases are.

Although car integration for Glass makes a lot more practical sense for me than other uses, I think there are a lot of other options that give you better and richer feedback. In car screens would have more detail than Glass, HUD displays projected on your lower windshield would be better yet as they could provide a ton of useful info.

If you discover a big bug/security hole in your web app, though, and make a fix, it is fixed

And if you are hacked, EVERYONE of your users is hacked also, instantly. There is some value even in the small buffer an Android app store deployment provides.

And if your web server goes down ALL of your users are down. A native app can keep on trucking and upload updates to you later.

Plus, with a web app, you have one code base across Android, iOS, Blackberry, Windows Phone, etc.

Holy cow is THAT wrong. You have never done serious mobile web development.

Installation period: web app, PER page download time. native app, application download. Winner, NATIVE app. O(1) vs O(n)...

Approval process: Yes there absolutely a web app is more flexible. So much more flexible that if your site is hacked everyone gets the corrupted version instantly.

Chances that your app gets removed: Since I've never had it happen in scores of native apps I've worked on, I would say the chances of that are really low outside of certain categories, that I don't develop for anyway...

Effort for end-user to update their copy of your application: Web app: Have to remember you even exist. Native app: Update reminder.

Competitors in the market: Come on, no way will native applications ever lose to web apps on this category. Native app development is inherently harder, and always will be, reducing competition.

Restrictions on in-app purchases: totally with you on a web app being the most flexible... BUT will they submit payment info with you? Meanwhile on iOS they don't use "real" money to pay you, just iTunes. Which do YOU think is more likely?

I've done in-app kinds of things on the web before and the conversion rate is an order of magnitude worse for web purchases than it is for native.

Chances the end user deletes your application to save storage space on their device: They may - but it also means they saw my apps name again. With a web app you just fade into obscurity, if you are REALLY lucky stuffed into a bookmark folder that no-one looks at for several years.

I'm nto saying there's no point to doing web development, there are lots of things I think belong on the web. But for real "applications" you are glossy over some huge advantages native applications have.

If you have a web app, you bypass this installation step.

I would argue this is absolutely not the case.

Security threats come MORE from the web than native application installs. So people are leery of clicking on links.

The idea that a "web app is installed on every computer in existence" is an interesting perspective on that practice.

If by "interesting" you mean "utter bullshit", then yes, that idea is "interesting". It means nothing until people run it. A native application downloaded is very likely to have been run at least once, so downloads actually mean something more meaningful than page hits in a web app.

The real problem, as this article outlines, is lots of government money flowing into colleges to prop up these mad levels of tuition.

Governments are lowering funding for higher education because they are out of money. Having government pour more money into colleges that are spending to excess is called ENABLING, not solving.

iOS/android app: installed base on day one: 0
web app: installed base on day one: a hundred million +

What are you getting at here?

Let's say you launch a new website/web app. How is your install base not ALSO zero?

It doesn't matter how many devices CAN run what you have built. What matters is, WILL they...

With either an Android or iOS app, your POTENTIAL install base is in the hundreds of millions. Furthermore, there's a huge increase in the chances of you getting paid for some of that work, which you can use to develop it further. With a web app chances are good you launch it, zero people notice, and you fade into obscurity.

Lastly, compare how many applications there are in the iOS/Android app stores, vs. how many web sites exist. Which has better odds of someone using what you have created?