Mobile App VS Mobile Webpage

I think apps have a good place in this world for playing games or performing specific singular tasks but to me, creating a 'mobile app' to visit a webpage or online community is self defeating. Why on earth would you do that? The technology exists to make that same site available in a webpage that can be designed to fit a mobile screen and/or language.

I dropped the idea of the 'mobile app' for my webpage some time ago and am waiting for someone to just create a template that meets the needs of the mobile devices instead. No downloading of apps, no specific types of phones required and anyone with internet on their phone can have far more functionality than the app Dolphin has presented here (which I find woefully underdeveloped to start with)

Someone enlighten me. What can an app do that I can;t design a webpage to do for itself?

sky, i think its the dynamics that are required to run a full fledged database driven site on a mobile app. just as you know and have stated, dolphin itself is resource intensive, and thats on wired devices. trying to accomplish the same thing on a mobile device, i.e. phone is not feasible at this juncture. it would require an intensive rewrite to get the entirety of dolphin to go mobile, and even then, not sure how applicable that could be. most web ready are written in different languages than what dolphin is written in. 

i went to look at one of the sites i frequent regularly, and there m site is a stripped down model of their web app (site). http://nascar.com

of course my phone is not just internet capable, it is an android, and you would have to consider the screen size(s) variances that you are referring to, and there is no way, or at least i wouldnt want to try to accomplish it, to write something that would be compatible fully with every phone that is internet capable. you are not going to find many sites that are viewable on a mobile device to be as fully functional as their web based app (site). 

a phone app, its more of a convenience, and in most cases an online mobile presence is just that, nothing more than a calling card, with some generalized contact information. 

"Any publicly-visible content could be pulled into the mobile format by mobilitee.  Think of the actual mobile app as just a container into which content is pushed by the included php proxy script.  Images should be automatically resized (via CSS) to fit the mobile screen, but you'll probably need to add your own bit of CSS styling.  If I were you, I wouldn't attempt to pull in the entire page (i.e., everything between the "body" tags, which is default), but choose the most informative and relevant parts.  Also, please note that content grabbed by mobilitee will automatically strip any javascript script tags, so the slideshow on the homepage wouldn't work unless you actually added that slideshow's code into the mobile version manually."

this was from a guy who i had inquired about the same thing. i am also still looking into this, if i find anything, i will make sure you are the first to know.

BTW, what kind of phone do you use? 

Crackberry.

 ok working on something now. will hit you when i have something to show.

multimedia fusion II (developer) now has an Ios exporter. This means you can drag and drop elements and graphics anf functions around until you heart is content - make an app - and then export it out to run on an I-phone or i-pad. Its very easy and much faster than coding. I'm not going to say that you could make  full blown app for your site, because that is very unlikely, but you can make games, and applications and just about amything elses you can think of....

It also exports as Flash (AS3), java, facebook, and many other formats. so you could build almost anything for your site if you knew what you were doing. I have used it to make loads of stuff for my site already.

Just a thought.

Nathan