
Phonegap 2.0 released - indianburger
http://phonegap.com/2012/07/20/adobe-phonegap-2-0-released.md//
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isnie
Used Phonegap on 2 projects and I have to say, never again. If you want to
have the job done right and you want a quality product, go native. We lost
days(weeks even) of time chasing an obscure bug in the location tracking of
Phonegap. Also, the end result wasn't very good to be honest. It lacked the
fluidity and responsiveness you have with native apps.

sure, you can develop things 2 as fast but then you spend all the rest of the
time just messing around to get that "native feel".

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willtheperson
Not all apps use native controls. Not all apps should be built on PhoneGap.

At my company, we need to build apps rapidly. By rapid, I mean 1 week for a
testable product. I have a app skeleton that implements backbone.js and some
"native" css controls ready to go. I can easily turn around an app in that
time.

Is it as fast as native? No. Do most people notice that? No. Does it prove the
app concept we were trying to test? Yes.

So we basically use it as a prototyping platform and if the app has a lot of
users, we'll go native. From my experience, it's much faster to prototype in
html5 than it is in obj-c.

~~~
isnie
you're describing a totally different scenario, as a rapid prototyping tool I
can totally see why you would choose Phonegap over native code. but as
something to give to the end user? not so much.

Although with Interface Builder and some wiring you can quickly mock something
up as well. But it probably would go faster in Phonegap to go from PSD to app.

I don't agree 100% with most people not noticing though. I do feel a smooth
app adds to the overal experience.

I tested the first app they showed in the Phonegap gallery and it has that
typical Phonegap feel to it: laggy response and glitchy transitions. It gives
the app a sloppy feel. Maybe people won't notice, but it's not a fun app to
use.

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digitalpacman
It's a shame that phones still can't properly handle web views well. My
company went with PhoneGap and tried implementing webviews but no matter what,
couldn't develop an app that ran well enough on phones. The folly of PhoneGap
isn't really PhoneGap's fault, but their premise. Phones are NOT ready for
Html5 apps. Tried. Failed. Now rewriting the entire app natively.

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pedalpete
can you give some insight as to what specific issue you were having? Was it
HTML5 that was the real culprit? Or javascript performance? Did you try
smaller javascript libraries, etc. etc.

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hammersend
I can't speak for the GP and I haven't used Phonegap but the problems I have
encountered trying to use webviews in apps revolve around touch latency and
animation. When a user touches an element on the screen they expect instant
response and I haven't seen that in any app using web technology. Also,
animation needs to be comparable to what you see natively. Even trying to
scroll images without scrolling the whole view is a recipe for lag and
choppiness. I don't want any part of that in my apps.

~~~
no_more_death
Google's solution for touch latency:
<https://developers.google.com/mobile/articles/fast_buttons>

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sunsu
One interesting new feature is the "Cordova Webview". This will make building
hybrid apps much more straight forward.

"Cordova WebView - This allows for the integration of PhoneGap, as a view
fragment, into a bigger native application."

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makmanalp
I imagine this will alleviate some of the speed concerns: You can make most of
your app native and the finnicky content parts PhoneGap.

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jenius
I gave this a shot and am already having a huge amount more trouble working
with the command line interface than I did with the > v1.9 xcode template.

The way it's put together is not elegant at all - it's used as a command line
tool, but they just drop you a random folder which has the executables and a
few other folders that the executable references, so it can't be copied to
/usr/local/bin, nor can it be symlinked. So creating a new app for me was
pretty unnatural.

On top of that, building it apparently can only be done from the command line
and not inside of xcode, and it uses outdated xcode tools. The command line
build required me to have the /Developer directory, which I do not have as it
was no longer installed with Xcode from version 4 and up.

Really unhappy with this initially for a number of reasons. Don't get me
wrong, I love working with the command line, and I like how rubymotion uses
the command line so much working with ios apps, but I'm disappointed in how
awkward this initial release is. I might just continue working with 1.9.0
until the next release.

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oellegaard
I just downloaded the newest release and installed the DMG inside the zipfile,
then went to the folder i downloaded and inside the /lib/ios/bin directory and
ran ./create --args

When i press "run" in xcode i get a simulator with the app. Looks pretty
smooth.

In terms of building, they offer this online as well, right?

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hswolff
Awesome news! They're developing Phonegap at a ferocious pace and I applaud
the team for their progress. It was only a few months ago that they were at
1.7 and today's release of 2.0 is simply awesome.

Congrats Phonegap team!

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chudi
Id tried phonegap in a project, completely disaster. Now in a new project for
Android, we use the same concept as phonegap, a Javascript interface plus a
WebView and JQuery Mobile with only the stuff that we need and we are having
better results, although its not like a native app.

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malandrew
I've seen at least one unreleased product that has achieved almost a Path-like
experience (dead serious) in Mobile Webkit Safari on the iPad 1, 2 and 3. It's
doable and not as hard as you think once you, but it takes embracing
everything modern browsers offer you and not building with backwards
compatibility in mind. It has yet to be packaged in PhoneGap for the AppStore,
but from my understanding the javascript engine available in PhoneGap apps is
more performatic.

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poundy
I would like some help with these:

\- Is there support for inapp payments? Built in or plugin based?

\- how does this compare with trigger.io and titanium?

\- does this version not need xcode to create apps like trigger.io?

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untog
\- <http://bit.ly/OFM5cK>

\- Titanium at least still uses native UI. I believe that neither trigger.io
nor PhoneGap do, though PG has a plugin to let you use some

\- It requires XCode.

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bootz15
Congrats!

BTW I'm pretty sure Adobe took over PhoneGap to replace its AIR/Flash long-
term debacle. Nice move.

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jc123
PhoneGap:Build requires registration with either Adobe ID or Github :|

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briandear
Phonegap is nothing more than a stopgap for people that can't afford iOS devs.
I can think of no benefits for the end user. It's a sloppy solution. Better
off just doing a mobile web app instead.

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marknutter
This is pure, unadulterated FUD. If your advice is to just do a mobile web
app, what on earth is wrong with packaging it up into a phonegap app so that
you can access a few extra APIs?

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comex
It's misleading.

Users have a higher expectation of quality from native apps than webapps.

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morphy
Those expectations don't reflect reality. Look at the quora and linkedin apps.
They are mostly web views and no one would even know if you didn't tell them.
I will admit the performance characteristics of javascript are much more
complex compared to objective-C, but the tradeoff is that you can share most
of the code across platforms, and you can iterate much faster without app
store approvals. On the other hand, if the mobile web was ready, phonegap
would not exist at all. At the very least, it's more nuanced than one platform
being superior than the other for any category of application, barring games.

~~~
marknutter
In my experience, on an iPhone 4S HTML5 apps feel _exactly_ as fast and
responsive as native apps, and phones are only going to get faster.

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zapt02
Does it support Bluetooth yet?

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mcantelon
Congrats!

