##Android or iPad? After the recent birth of my son, I have had a little time away from work. I have been using the downtime to work on some personal projects in order to build skills and perhaps increase my own personal economic resiliance.

I had been entertaining the idea of writing a native mobile app, but honestly the idea of java or objective c is not that appealing. I also think it is a waste of time to build an app that would only work on one of the platforms.

Luckily there is a compromise. By wrapping a traditional web app in a webkit view, an essentially native app can be written in html and javascript.

##Client Side Contenders For the last 15+ years, several languages have been competing for dominance in the arena of creating richly interactive applications for the web. Java and flash have both been bested by javascript in the browser. It is a safe bet that javascript will also become the lingua franca of mobile apps, as well.

Some people argue that javascript will never perform as well as cocoa and I don’t disagree. However, for the vast majority of applications, js will do the job. Since so many of us are already comfortable with javascript and html, the idea of leveraging those skills for mobile devices is appealing.

##Dead Languages I would never suggest that learning another programming language is a waste of time, but if you are proficient at javascript you already have everything you need to start writing native apps for ios and android. You’ll be able to sell them in the app store and your users will never know the difference.

##Platform Quirks There are definitely some hurdles to developing a mobile web app that works like a native app. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it. It will help if you already have experience with modern client side frameworks like backbone or knockout. Taking a strong front end approach will ease the transition. Javascript is an idiosyncratic language that needs to be used with mindfulness.