Mobile Web Vs. App Dev

James working on a mobile app for GSB alumni website - not much UX because based on existing website
Who is working on mobile projects now, what is your experience can you please share?
Attendee A telling us about his 4th project, He is doing responsive design according to the W3C model, previous projects for Highwire required him to do separate apps
did RWD for Blackberry, iPhone and Android, for sites with Drupal frontend
feels RWD is best based on budgetary constraints and time and effort
J Gingold, Alumni Association, cautions against relying on RWD too much, not a one size fits all, might be better to use jquery mobile for apps
Has there been more of a push to RWD rather than rethinking things and creating apps?
Hugh asked if Drupal had some themes that work better for RWD? 
GBS - Yes, university has a couple that work better than others   
Hugh - might depend on whether you are starting from scratch or building on a framework, a number of frameworks out there and you plug in all your info 
takes care of your device detection, easy to add new devices 
definitions: 
mobile app - connected to server
native app - on device
Michael Fox, LBR - did solely native app - for their own user population, tested with ??? iPhone and android, they hated android, loved iPhone
did extensive work with a vender AppTree Software, licensed framework from them, licensed mobile client for iOS, then worked on api's
from UX standpoint, can do some work offline, UI off the shelf but they did some small amount of customization
tied into to webauth for authentication
was a much heavier development effort but had its advantages
Administrative Services looking at using APEX for developing a mobile UI, 
several groups interested in having online and offline capabilities, allows users to do things away from their desk e.g. inventory updates, scheduling activities
Do you ever just decide that you know the UI is so ugly then for that device say "we recommend you switch to something else"?
James - right now we are just doing what we can with RWD and for some pages they just have to go to the full webpage
we are hampered by no time, no money and the attitude of how can we get this out as soon as possible?
That's what is so exciting about Drupal, changes can be made with less development cycles
What I'm wrestling with right now is creating native apps, we have no iPhone or android developers, GSB alumni expect something better from Stanford
Michael - we are also responsible for the campus map that faces the public, trying to develop apps for all devices is not possible, so we struggle with making the web version work for all, it is only marginally usable on mobile, we are struggling a little bit to determine whether we want to integrate with device location services or not - use Google Maps as underlying base with ST specific roads, buildings
AttendeeA  - how long did it take for you to finish your mobile apps?
Michael - took us a little over a year from funding to release to user community, I think it would have taken us as long to do as a web app and would have required more compromise, part of what took time was developing APIs to Oracle web system-that would have been true whether mobile or native
J Gingold - RWD is not effortless, if you are retrofitting you can do some but to do really well with mobile you have to build with mobile in mind from the ground up, so more work upfront but in the long run it may be easier to maintain
David - figuring out breakpoints in RWD can be difficult especially with new devices coming out
Roadmap for open framework - currently uses Bootstrap and looking at making more web savvy so can use web components - starting small to do static ??  which goes into the RWD solution want to use fontawsome, bower, yeoman. Three parts to project - first go to initializer.com to put components into a framework e.g. drupal, wordpress, wiki - second thing will be to build library of code snippets e.g. carousel, etc have to do everything from scratch, no accessibility standards - third thing have all templates in compiled form be available to other groups to use
- starting with compiled templates first, then create generator then build library as they go - will be long project, 1 yr+
RWD works better to existing skill set of people, iOS and others require more skillets
jquery mobile was tried for isolated requirements but has a UI layer that mimics iOS behavior, still requires you to create a separate site, so now we are leaning towards using same content in separate ways
Attendee A prefers jqmobile to rwd but jq seems like a trap
Attendee C does jq include css and all? it's a library with UI components
AttendeeC all these packages go together real quick - bootstrap, initializers, generators, angular.js etc are very helpful
- its important to stay in line with web community outside of st to make these templates work on the current templates, frameworks, etc.
David - we've been in touch with other U's to collaborate and learn from each other UCLA has created ??? now on 1.0, working on 2.0 now
James - do you want to mention something about the cost involved in dealing with a vendor? have you researched any open source platforms?
David - from total project a little over $100k, big chunk was API dev, we did look at going with mobile web but when they saw framework from vendor it allowed us to jump three steps ahead, 
lots of user testing during dev process, initial req gathering - had stakeholders valid eat business process, is this really right workflow
with usable app, had internal testing by BA, validate functionality, then ready for user testing, after all that end user teasting was pretty non eventful which is because they defined architecture, workflow and what goes on each screen, this app replaced ancient, MS app, now have phase 2 plan for next year, 
David - the API work you've dev'ed, is that available to other groups on campus? available to others who can use it but very specific to land and real estate
phonegap and accelerator will convert a mobile app into a native app, just a wrapper that doesn't take advantage of native device capabilities