Well you can really tell the PhoneGap community is starting to mature when a post like this comes out. Daniel Pfeiffer and the crew at Float must be really sharp guys and we’re stoked they’re using PhoneGap and sharing a bit of their knowlege. I don’t want to steal their thunder so here’s just outline of their
-Test on a device early
-Listen for ‘touchstart’ instead of ‘click’
-CSS Animations
-Optimize your JavaScript
-Try a different JavaScript library
-Concatenate and minify
-JSLint
-Update the OS
-Split up the work
-Disable the multi-tasking
Please let me know if you have any other tips to share with the rest of the PhoneGap community.
The guys over at Tiny Hippos have been kicking ass on their mobile dev emulator Ripple. It’s a Chrome Extension that helps develop PhoneGap apps by simulating data from PhoneGap APIs.
Check out this PhoneGap Geo demo in Ripple:
Can’t wait to see what this crew does next! Check out their blog post on it here.
Just caught this ComputerWorld article on New Zealand’s famous WebStock conference. Looks like one of the themes this year was HTML5 and cross platform development. Although no one from Nitobi from the PhoneGap team was there to speak it looks like Facebook’s open source guru David Recordon (@daveman692) gave PhoneGap and PhoneGap Build a nice little plug in his presentation.
“Fortunately, development environments are evolving to ease multiple builds. Facebook’s David Recordon, in a presentation centered on HTML5, spoke of PhoneGap, a service for developers to “write your app using HTML, CSS or JavaScript, upload it to the PhoneGap Build service and get back app-store ready apps for Apple iOS, Google Android, Palm, Symbian, BlackBerry and more”.”
Thanks Dave! Feels nice to get a mention from person and company who’s clearly kicking ass in the mobile space!
I did just want to clear up that the name PhoneGap has nothing to the clothing chain. As was maybe implied by “The name alludes to the economical-products-for-everyone approach of the Gap clothing chain.” We’re trying to bridge the gap between native and web technologies that’s all:)
Hopefully I can head down to New Zealand and WebStock next year!
Our friends across the pond at Ribot have just had their killer movie browsing app Just One More featured by Apple as New and Noteworthy in the App Store.
Christina Warren just posted a good high level overview of how HTML5 is addressing cross platform dev for devices.
On PhoneGap:
PhoneGap is an HTML5 app platform that lets developers build native apps using HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. What really sets PhoneGap apart is that it lets developers create a full-functioning mobile web app but place that app in a native wrapper, so that it can use native device APIs and get submitted to the App Store or Android Market.
In essence, it enables mobile developers to create an app just as if they were targeting the mobile browser but with the benefit of being able to get into the App Store.
PhoneGap Build is a new service (still in beta) that lets developers quickly and easily create app-store ready versions of their apps for various platforms. It does all the work of compiling the code for various platforms and gives the developer a final build suitable for submission to the app market of their choice.
I don’t really consider Titanium as an HTML5 solution but it does tackle cross platform dev.
Listen to Brian’s recent interview on PhoneGap, Nitobi, PhoneGap and the mobile web in general.
Brian LeRoux, spacelord!1!! at Nitobi, joined us to discuss PhoneGap, an open source project to enable mobile application development with web development tools. We also discuss Nitobi itself and the organization that enables the development of a project like PhoneGap.
NS BASIC Corporation announced that it now supports PhoneGap. That means apps created with NS Basic/App Studio get more power under the hood and additional APIs and functionality including compass, contacts, camera, files and notifications. These apps also become portable to platforms that support JavaScript, HTML5 and Webkit.
Find out more about NS Basic/App Studio and PhoneGap.
Fred Wilson a very well respected investor just came to a realization about HTML5 apps that is going to send fan boys screaming!
I saw two HTML5 apps yesterday. One running in my Android browser. The other running in the iPad browser. They looked and worked exactly like their mobile app counterparts. It was a mind opening moment.
via A VC: HTML5 Mobile Apps. So how much money is Fred going to be putting in companies building multiple native apps per platform? This is going to be more an more the case as HTML/JS technologies evolve and devices get faster. Fred’s not even talking about PhoneGap apps which could give you even more features that makes you HTML5 equal to a native app, yet cross platform. Although a large number of technologists have understand this for a long time it’s nice to see non tech focused folks starting to realize that HTML5 can be on par with native apps…so don’t through your money away!
For insights from Fred I’d have a look at the recent interview from Fred at O’reilly’s Web 2.0 Summit. Fred calls it like he sees it and doesn’t get wrapped up in hype that other folks in the echo chamber might.
FYI. Fred’s an investor in Twitter, Foursquare, Tumblr and others you may have heard of via Union Square Ventures.
A couple weeks ago Ars Technica released their iPad App. It’s certainly one of the nicer PhoneGap apps I’ve seen today. It’s very simple and feels like a native in look and in feel. Scrolling through the articles is great. IBM built the app for them, which is very exciting to us at Nitobi and for the rest of the PhoneGap project. It’s a great example of what can be achieved with HTML5, JS and CSS. They have a full write up on how they built it on their blog.
Here’s a quick video of me interacting with the app:
Download it from iTunes here. Let me know what you think and if you have any feedback. There’s also an update on the Ars blog about how they’re planning to improve scrolling and navigation in a future release of the app. Kudos to them on a job well done and being very transparent about that!
