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Now a days everyone is thinking to go mobile. When we think of mobile, iPhone comes first to the mind as it caters the mass. These days, we see more template sites popping up to provide iPhone friendly templates. There are other platforms like Android too which are gaining mass, but iPhone seems to be a leader in all till now.

I am still not sure if iPhone friendly template is what all Joomla needs or it can be one more step ahead to have iphone application which supports basic version on Joomla, i.e. Articles, contact us etc. I have tried to add up the pros and cons of iPhone template V/S iPhone app for joomla.




A. iPhone Template


+ve Cost effective solution (Can get the template purchased by spending only few bugs)
+ve No need for user to download an iphone app, just adjusts in safari.
+ve Most of the sections of the website can be viewed easily except some specific components which requires extra templates.
+ve No dependence of appStore.

-ve User interface is not just appealing.
-ve Cant be used in absence of internet connectivity.
-ve Does not leave any sort of branding as compared to an iPhone app.

B. iPhone Application for Joomla


+ve Provides a better UI.
+ve Can take advantage of camera, stored images etc.
+ve Leaves branding (As the application resides on user's iphone and on appStore)
+ve Offline contents like news articles etc can be viewed later on.

-ve It may be a costly affair.
-ve It requires site admin to register with appStore to list their app and make it free to download.
-ve Some user may exit when prompted to download app while browsing website via iphone browser.
<b>
Which one is better Template or App?
What will be the biggest reason for going with Template against app?
What will be the biggest reason for going with App against Template?</b>

Your participation will be highly appreciated.

Regards,

Dave.

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I believe it would be possible to create a template for all mobile platforms, not a separate for iphone and separate for android. I believe many smartphones today share the same resolutions (240x320 or 480x800), so the same template could be used for all of them.

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The template frameworks by Joomla Art(T3) and Rocket Theme (gantry) both include iphone support.

T3 needs time to get familiar with, here http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/mobile you can find many excellent extensions which are ready to use.

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ijoomer, what percentage of users on your website are using iPhone? Do you have any statistics to share? I wonder if this number is worth the extra effort.

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While T3 and Gantry require time to get familiar with, both tend to produce sites that are both cross browser compliant and mobile browser friendly.

@koter: Personally, I have found that iphone compatible sites range from 0.1% to 20% of their visitors being iphone users.

All these web-resources have got all the information regarding the iphone template for joomla, which are all useful.
Joomlatp[.]com/joomla1...templates/joomla-templates-for-Apple-iphone.html
hotjoomlatemplates[.]com/joomla-templates/31-joomla-iphone-template-hot-mobility
mobility[.]mobi/showthread.php?19317-iPhone-template[...]joomla
joomla24[.]com/[...]/Template.../iPhone_template_for_Joomla_1.5[.]html
taptheme[.]com/joomla-iphone-templates/taptheme-iphone[.]php

We use T3 framework for all of our clients now, who are asking for mobile support.

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Do you have any idea if the cookie tracking on the iPhone does work - or do I have to consider anything special for cookies on the iphone?

From where i can download Template for my iphone?

I think iphone will be friendly template with joomla what it needs.

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When will one be available for the Android system?

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Ive been starting to look at T3 very recently and from the outset it looks good alhough does require getting your head around a fair bit but Id love it if someone could point me in the direction of a comparison to Gantry or some good example mobile layouts for it?!?

"Which one is better Template or App?"

Difficult if not even impossible to say, pretty much depends on your site and your needs.


"What will be the biggest reason for going with Template against app?"

Customizable at any time. You can alter data structures or the interface at any time without sending each time an app update to Apple. Thats only relavant if you expect essential changes on site anyway.
The template variant also enables doors to other platforms. There are some templates which cover the most obvious devices.


"What will be the biggest reason for going with App against Template?"
Speed and spectacular interfaces and of course direct access to revenue creating feature of the iOS platform.


To correct some of your points :

"No need for user to download an iphone app, just adjusts in safari." : There is a little thing Apple seems not like with webapps runnings in fullscreen. It looks that they introduced on purpose bugs in the webkit which may force you to package your webapp into a native container and submit it to iTunes.

"User interface is not just appealing." Well, it can look really neat : www.[no tiny url]/imtablet2. Thats a pretty and quite complete HTML5 user-interface for Joomla, still in progress.

"Cant be used in absence of internet connectivity", A template should technically be able to do so if done correctly.

"It may be a costly affair.". What's cost affair ? We're spending til 1500,- Euro each year for plugs,templates,etc.. I know that you can have your Joomla app cheaper than 500 bucks.

hope it helps,
G

after now finally 18 months working full-time on mobile web app as well its native counterpart, related to Joomla content, I can confirm this here :

http://sparkwiz.com/mobile-apps/should- ... e-website/

There is indeed no answer. It really depends on the mentioned needs.

I've done dozens of optimization iterations on the web front and I think we've got it very close (95%) to native performance and look & feel (test here our latest version : https://bitly.com/webxapp on the device). My guess is that another 3% are possible but it will involve another 2 months ( Currently we're at 1.2 seconds for a page change, and the goal is 400ms, We use Dojo! JQuery performs quite bad in complex apps).

However, you may say the performance of the test app might be enough but we've got customers who still say no to mobile web because(test app here http://www.xapp-studio.com/XApp-portlet ... 3536987b2e ) :

- Brand values & design are too important to make any compromise (I agree!). We tried really hard but they're not convinced (yet:-)
- Page change tooo long (really ?)
- No offline maps (yet!)
- Links to some external pages (we've added an internal browser) interrupt the app and therefore bad user experience.
- Quite some visual artifacts regarding retina displays. We did at least the major part regarding those displays but when using CSS3 there are indeed some strange issues which are difficult to fix.

Ah, one thing left is, we also tried to implement our mobile web solution as regular Joomla template but we encountered too many bottlenecks with PHP and the nature of the Joomla core. You will only reach a page change of less than 500ms if you drive your data supply with AJAX only and use a very optimized and unified data format(pre-thinking and loading of obvious data whilst the app is in a quite state. Caching of that data is gold here). But use the new web-sockets ! They are a fantastic speed-ups! And that's not all, the hardest part after that is to get rid of heavy DOM operations of the mobile browser. Making a transition via CSS3 between 2 almost naked diffs is just slow. But hey, as I loved to chase for every ms in game engine development, I'll definitely look at a canvas solution and I will let you know about :-)

well, that's the state of art for us at least.
amen,
g

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