Improve the iPhone web interface or start working on a native client?

Hello,

The Mentat iPhone interface is starting to look pretty primitive compared to our BlackBerry client. We’re not ready to switch back to working on the iPhone interface quite yet, and we’ve also been talking about ditching the iPhone web interface entirely and focusing on both a native OS X client and a native iPhone client as well.

I’m curious to know if people would rather see the web interface developed in the short term, or if they’d rather see a richer iPhone client once the Apple SDK is released in February. We can start development now using the iPhone hacks that are available, and most of the code should work fine with the SDK once it’s released.

what is it that you could do in a native app that you couldn’t do in the web interface?
I think one of the attractions to your service is that it’s web based and consistent on any platform. With that said I’m a mac user with an iphone and have not seen the blackberry client. Any screen shots around?

A good question, It mostly comes down to network bandwidth and availability. Here’s a blog article I wrote on the very subject about a month ago.
Web apps versus native apps
We have some screenshots of the BlackBerry client here
It uses stock UI resources right now, our intent is to pretty it up with custom graphics before our final release.
-Daniel

Why wouldn’t you create a symbian client? surely a much larger install base than iphone, I have an N95 which has a safari based web browser.

Improve iPhone web app interface gets my vote. Seen the recent blog for the Mentat native app for iPhone and still like the web app much better. The web app keeps the Mac feel and Mac heritage. The native app looses that feel. The web app is just missing a lot of functionally that I’d like to see included in the future =).
I’ve used/tried lots and lots of to-do lists and GTD web apps for iPhone and I have to say that I stuck with Mentat. The iPhone web app UI is awesome and with some new functionally included, it would be in a league of its own.
-justin

Hello Justin!
The web interface will continue to get updates as we move forward, but we are spending our immediate energy and resources on the native application.
Honestly, your praise for the web interface is heartwarming. As I’ve indicated previously, whenever I look at the web interface I see only limitations.
I’ll be posting additional screenshots of the Mentat app later this week. We want this to be a first class iPhone citizen, and we are definitely going to make sure that it looks like a Mac application.
-Daniel

I’m always in favour of native apps. I would much rather wait for a robust native app than ask you to invest resources into the iPhone web interface.