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Introducing PonyGap: PhoneGap Plugins for Android | December 17th, 2009

PhoneGap Plugins Demo from Joe Bowser on Vimeo.

Recently, we have been working on each platform to get the platform-specific features to be encapsulated as plugins. Now, for the iPhone, that may take the shape of native controls, but for Android, we’re working on a project for the plugins called PonyGap. Why did I call it PonyGap? Because chances are that you would use this app in a demo, and that you would most likely stick to the basic feature set of HTML5. Of course, you MIGHT use one of these, but generally not all of them.

Currently the first plugin feature that we added was the ttsHook. This will hook into the Android Text to Speech functionality and allow PhoneGap applications to be useful to people who may not necessarily have the best vision or coordination. We’ll work on a better MobileSafari example and release it with the plugin.

This functionality was inspired by the Eyes Free work that Google did.

Update: This post is now obsolete, and there’s a new and different method of creating plugins for Android. Please visit the PhoneGap-Plugins repo for more info.

Posted in Android, phonegap | 7 Comments » | Add to Delicious | Digg It

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 17th, 2009 at 7:42 pm and is filed under Android, phonegap. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

7 Responses to “Introducing PonyGap: PhoneGap Plugins for Android”

  1. Jing Says:

    Hi,

    We have an application that are using lower level system calls such as bluetooth spp etc, that is not available using MoSync/PhoneGap etc. I wonder if we can build ourselves the lower level functions in native for each platform, but be able to make api/plugin calls from using these cross platform products, so we can use it for developing the top UI layer. I wonder if you have had success with these and any recommendations/best practices.

    thanks for any help,

    Jing

  2. WebIntent, an Android PhoneGap Plugin | Boris Smus Says:

    [...] PhoneGap project provides a plugin architecture, which isn’t very well documented. Perhaps as a result, there are very few Android plugins [...]

  3. Boris Smus Says:

    Thanks for the plugin framework, Joe!

    I’ve been working on WebIntent, a plugin to let PhoneGap applications integrate with Android intents. Just published an article about it, which includes a brief walkthrough on writing Android plugins: http://goo.gl/gJ6ol

  4. martijn Says:

    I cannot seem to find a download link for ponygap, is there one?

  5. CSJakharia Says:

    Link for Phonegap plugin is missing.

  6. louboutin Says:

    I cannot seem to find a download link for ponygap, is there one?

  7. Nadine L. Says:

    Hi,

    I’m a vision impaired person and interested in the text-to-speech plugin for phonegap. Could you publish that plugin, please?
    It would make it possible to write accessible applications for the blind with phonegap.

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