Now Off-Line Desktop to Mobile: Chrome Web Apps

By Namit - December, 4th 2013

In early September, an update of technology Chrome Packaged Apps gave autonomy to Web applications related to Internet browser Google .

Latter became usable offline, directly on the desktop in Windows environments, OS X, Linux, and Chrome OS with a full screen and a dedicated icon in the taskbar, as if they were desktop software traditional.

A special section, called ‘for your computer’, was opened on this occasion in the repository Chrome Web Store.

Thirty applications currently include the catalog enriched as developers exploit HTML5 and APIs delivered by Google.

The Internet group now seems to want to go further by declining the concept mobile.

This is at least what leaves suggest a project hosted on GitHub, under the leadership of Michal Mocny (developer at Google) and named Chrome Mobile Apps .

According to the resourcesn , this initiative aims to create a toolkit to simplify porting Chrome Web Apps on iOS and Android.

In question, according to a developer who spoke onnewsgroups Google launched a beta version in January 2014.

At the heart of the project include the soution development platform Apache Cordova , available for Windows Phone, Android, iOS, BlackBerry OS, WebOS, Bada and Symbian.

This set of APIs allows in particular to manage storage dynamically, but also to use native functions that Web Apps does not generally have access: camera, accelerometer and other electromagnetic sensors …

Combined with a framework like jQuery or Dojo Mobile Mobile, this set allows you to develop mobile applications in HTML, CSS and JavaScript without using native code.

A graft was developed for example. It allows you to decompress archives. Zip on iOS and Android.

In a first step, Chrome Web Apps should run on Android 4.0 and all subsequent versions. No information, however, for iOS.