Phonegapping

After a problem where I could not scroll the application up and down with the touch screen, I soon saw the quality of the Phonegap CSS in all it's glory on my phone:

Phonegap example app running on my HTC Desire

The scrolling issue needed a slight code adjustment:

function init(){

document.addEventListener("touchmove", false);

document.addEventListener("deviceready", deviceInfo, true);

}

The first line of the function did read: document.addEventListener("touchmove", preventBehavior, false);

I will now continue to play with Phonegap but I'm starting to see it's limitations. I can see it not being very responsive and obviously games are out of the question. When I say games I mean anything with any movement, puzzle and strategy etc should be ok. In fact it maybe worth looking at some existing Javascript stuff and maybe porting it to Phonegap.

Is phonegap cheating?

Chapter 3 of the book has gone waaaaayyy over my head. It seems to have gone up a few notches very quickly. There are no comparisons to existing languages to ease you in. So as a result I've put the book down for a bit and decided to look at phonegap. It still uses Eclipse for the IDE but everything else is HTML, Javascript and CSS.

I've built the sample in no time and I am already changing it to get an idea of how it will look. Firstly the sample CSS makes everything look like a native app, very slick. But you would think it would not have the capability of a native app... you would be wrong. You can make the phone vibrate, beep, take readings from the accelerometer, geolocation, bring up the dialler etc... Pretty much everything the average developer would want. Also it is multi platform compatible so with a bit of work it can run on iPhone, Blackberry, Symbian and Palm as well as Android. I'm not too fussed by that but you never know, a killer app multiplied by 5 outlets is more than just one. Next I'm going to see what the sample app looks like on my HTC Desire.

Slow going

Just a quick post to say I'm still working my way through the book. Had a read of chapter 3 which talks about dialogues, intents and activities. I think it will take a couple of read-throughs to get this cemented in my brain. Plus it might be worth while me doing some simple Java tutorials in the meantime as the book has already used some examples with code in, of which I have zero clue about!