14 DAY TRIAL // Google has relented on the fact that native mobile apps aren't going anywhere anytime soon, but it's still pushing its web products, moving on both fronts in parallel.
Its Gmail website for mobile devices is getting a small revamp which should make it more functional and better looking on a small number of devices.
"On the mobile team, we strive to produce web apps which look and feel just like installed apps. In the past few weeks, we’ve released a number of features which make Gmail for mobile look sharper and feel smoother," Daniel Brotherston, mobile software engineer at Google, wrote.
One neat trick that Gmail for (some) mobile devices has introduced is "pull down for refresh." As the name of the feature implies, you can refresh your email list just by pulling down on it.
A bar indicating that the inbox will be refreshed shows up on touch devices. This only works on iOS and Playbook devices.
Another new feature, if you can call it that, is better quality icons for the main navigational buttons. These show up only on the high-resolution iPhone 4, Google says.
Finally, Gmail also gets a series of snazzy transitions between the different screens, for example going from reading an email back to the inbox. Google used several CSS3 transitions along with some JavaScript to achieve the effects.
What's interesting to note is that, although Google has always touted the fact that web is a universal platform, the new features are very limited in terms of availability, some only work on one device, the iPhone 4.
The main advantage of the open web, one code for all platforms, is gone if you have to add features one device at a time.
Hopefully, HTML5 adoption and support will reach a point where advanced features are supported by all mobile browsers, but we're still some time off from that point.