Skip to main content

Building Blocks of My First Native App





A few months back when I was at the NASSCOM Tech-Unique (yes the second version of the It-NIketan where I had to deliver a speech last time) it seemed the event mostly centered about how Mobile Web is emerging and how we should embrace it.
In the discussion there we several interesting points raised and people started dragging PhoneGap in. While this was a very interesting topic, it disturbed me for certain reasons.


I raised my worries, and unfortunately the speakers or the panel couldn't come to any solutions. So I am still at a loss for the cons of this method.
Nevertheless I decided to put my mind out on the matter.


I consider myself well-versed in web development, and I was excited about the features that PhoneGap brings to web apps. Going the HTML5 web app route seemed like the most sane route.


Pros
  • You don't have to learn any new languages if you're already a decent web developer
  • It's very quick to prototype
  • Though we didn't end up using it, jQuery mobile is pretty neato and makes it even faster prototype
  • Lots of library options for pretty much everything you could possibly want
  • It's really cool and fun
  • If you so wanted to, you can bypass the app store by hosting the files on a server, and utilize app cache to make things speedy. Changing your app is just changing a web page and its cache manifest file
  • Managing images for multiple devices is a lot easier with CSS and media queries than it is for an iOS xcode project and an Android project with its ldpi, hdpi, xdpi, and whatever dpi.
  • Easier to create vector graphics to design spec
  • Hell, it's just easier to get things to be exactly like the design (except if you care about cross-browser compatibility)

Cons
  • There are a lot of mobile browsers out there (the state of browsers is worse than its ever been in terms of how many different crappy ones we have to support - it used to be just one, but guess how many people are on android 2.x and wp)
  • There are a lot of mobile devices out there with varying hardware, screen sizes, and network speed
  • Some features you're used to using aren't there for all devices (position: static for instance) and since those are likely the crappy devices, using a javascript shim (like iScroll) is out of the question if you care about performance
  • There seems to be some version issues with the facebook-connect plugin for phonegap (cordova) and the latest versions of phonegap on iOS only - To get facebook connect and PhoneGap to work I had to use an older version of PhoneGap
  • Documentation for PhoneGap itself is pretty decent, but it's still new, so not a whole lot of people have reliable information on current versions (at least this was the case 5-6 months ago)
  • Since I had to use an older version of PhoneGap, I found that some of their api functions would cause javascript errors. I had to bypass the sugar they provide and call PhoneGap.exec directly on their com.phonegap.whateverFunctionality - It was ugly, but it worked
  • There are complications with linking to other apps like Google maps
  • I found that saving contacts did not work on all versions of iOS
  • jQuery Mobile + Backbone is more of a pain in the ass than you think
  • Getting neato transitions can be a pain
  • There are less facilities in javascript for modularization of large-scale applications than Objective-C or Java

If your app is simple, then I recommend it. I really did enjoy the process and seeing my web app as an installed app. But, just know that it is more trouble than it appears to be

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

FirefoxOS, A keyboard and prediction: Story of my first contribution

Returning to my cubical holding a hot cup of coffee and with a head loaded with frustration and panic over a system codebase that I managed to break with no sufficient time to fix it before the next morning.  This was at IBM, New York where I was interning and working on the TJ Watson project. I returned back to my desk, turned on my dual monitors, started reading some blogs and engaging on Mozilla IRC (a new found and pretty short lived hobby). Just a few days before that, FirefoxOS was launched in India in the form of an Intex phone with a $35 price tag. It was making waves all around, because of its hefty price and poor performance . The OS struggle was showing up in the super low cost hardware. I was personally furious about some of the shortcomings, primarily the keyboard which at that time didn’t support prediction in any language other than English and also did not learn new words. Coincidentally, I came upon Dietrich Ayala in the FirefoxOS IRC channel, who...
Read more

April Fool and Google Part 2: A Round Up of ALL of Google’s April Fools Jokes

Ok....this post I think will contain all of the pranks I could find  for today. After my last post here http://rkrants.blogspot.com/2012/04/april-fool-and-google-my-favorite.html Last Time I reported Only a handful of the pranks.. Understandable, as it was only the morning. After that I stumbled upon more of them Which I am gonna round up here. Now staring with the list. The very first one is obviously our favourite Google Maps Quest The above is their official video. In a post in Google Plus they say about it as follows  Today  + Google Maps  announced Google Maps 8-bit for NES. With #8bitmaps , you can do everything you'd normally do in Maps—search for famous landmarks and sites around the world, get directions and even use Street View. Just in time for April Fool's Day, Google has introduced Google Maps Quest, a retro 8-bit version of its mapping tool that is... totally awesome. In a characteristically whimsical video, availabl...
Post a Comment
Read more

Curious case of Cisco AnyConnect and WSL2

One thing Covid has taught me is the importance of VPN. Also one other thing COVID has taught me while I work from home  is that your Windows Machine can be brilliant  as long as you have WSL2 configured in it. So imagine my dismay when I realized I cannot access my University resources while being inside the University provided VPN client. Both of the institutions I have affiliation with, requires me to use VPN software which messes up WSL2 configuration (which of course I realized at 1:30 AM). Don't get me wrong, I have faced this multiple times last two years (when I was stuck in India), and mostly I have been lazy and bypassed the actual problem by side-stepping with my not-so-noble  alternatives, which mostly include one of the following: Connect to a physical machine exposed to the internet and do an ssh tunnel from there (not so reliable since this is my actual box sitting at lab desk, also not secure enough) Create a poor man's socks proxy in that same box to have...
Post a Comment
Read more