As you might be able to guess from the name, appMobi is a company about developing mobile applications. More specifically, it’s interested in providing developers with the tools they need to create HTML and JavaScript applications that can run on any mobile phone or web browser. And today it has announced a new product which it claims can increase the rendering speed of HTML5 games by up to 500%
The product is called DirectCanvas. AppMobile claims it accelerates the HTML5 canvas element, making the visual rendering speed for games developed over HTML5 much smoother and faster on mobile devices:
What we think?
The promise of HTML5 has always been that it will allow a truly native app experience on any phone, but will only require the app to be developed once. The biggest problem is that HTML5 advocates started trumpeting this long before HTML5 was anywhere near ready to actually live up to that promise. Questions remain over whether or not devices actually support the high functioning HTML5 features necessary to run a complex gaming application – but appMobi does seem to be addressing the speed issue here. I can’t deny that the differences shown in the above video are genuinely impressive, but it’s also true that we don’t know the exact conditions under which that test was run. The only true test will come from an actual games developer using the DirectCanvas platform and reporting on how smooth they found it.
