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How to get that native iOS feel with PhoneGap

mikedellanoce.com

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Re: How to get that native iOS feel with PhoneGap

#31

Post by briandear »

eli wrote: post #28
veeti wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> PhoneGap sacrifices the quality of the UI for benefits in other areas You said it yourself. PhoneGap is an easy way to get a sub-par user experience and that is what matters the most, not development speed.

That is hardly a universal truth. I'd take ugly code that ships on time over beautiful code that doesn't.

Ok Mark Zuckerberg. Shipped code does not always beat unshipped code if the shipped code is shitty. In App Store contexts, badly shipped code can kill your app before it gains any traction leaving future updates moot. Anytime you deliver less than a beautiful UX you are doing a disservice to the user. The product can be simple and MVPish, but you should never ship shitty code. Zuckerberg doesn't know what he's talking about.

Re: How to get that native iOS feel with PhoneGap

#32

Post by flyosity »

kerrishotts wrote: post #16

One thing I didn't notice, but is important in stoping overscroll is to se the UIWebViewBounce property in Cordova.plist to NO. This ensures you don't have to worry about things like ScrollFix which almost-but-not-quite-solves the same issue. Why Cordova defaults this to YES is beyond me.

Nothing kills the illusion of an iPhone app feeling native faster than getting rid of overflow bouncing in a scrollable view. I understand there are performance benefits, but it feels so wrong on iOS.

Re: How to get that native iOS feel with PhoneGap

#33

Post by stungeye »

tszming wrote: post #5

Are there any working examples using these tricks so we can test the difference? (The author's product request an invite to use)

I recommend checking out the Photoswipe source. It uses many of these techniques to create a swipe-based image gallery optimized for iOS and Android.

https://github.com/codecomputerlove/PhotoSwipe

Here's a simple HTML5/Photoswipe/Phonegap app I wrote that you could experiment with:

https://github.com/stungeye/HTML5-Tumblr-Mobile-App

Explained here: http://mobilehtml5.stungeye.com

Re: How to get that native iOS feel with PhoneGap

#34

Post by IanDrake »

briandear wrote: post #30
veeti wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> PhoneGap sacrifices the quality of the UI for benefits in other areas You said it yourself. PhoneGap is an easy way to get a sub-par user experience and that is what matters the most, not development speed.

The UX is the absolute most important thing. Anything that sacrifices the user experience just to make it easier to develop is a bad tool. It's a tool for the lazy.

Well, maybe, but this is also a great tool for the enterprise that wants a consistent look and feel across their supported range of devices with one code base.

Probably the biggest problem with PG is that it's frequently used with JQM, which in my opinion (after over a year of development with this combo) is slow. Mostly because it's browser compatibly goal is too broad.

I'd really like to see a mobile optimized version of twitter bootstrap for PG.

Re: How to get that native iOS feel with PhoneGap

#35

Post by mdellanoce »

richardw wrote: post #20

How much does optimizing for iOS do anything bad for the app on, say, Android?

I can't really say, because we haven't done much testing on Android yet. My understanding is that Android's WebView uses a webkit rendering engine, but generally has poorer performance than the iOS UIWebView. So my guess is optimizing for iOS won't necessarily hurt anything for Android, but Android won't have quite as good of an experience. Hopefully this will get better with time... the UIWebView performance increase we saw from iOS 4 to iOS 5 is encouraging.

Re: How to get that native iOS feel with PhoneGap

#36

Post by mdellanoce »

IanDrake wrote: post #34
briandear wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UX is the absolute most important thing. Anything that sacrifices the user experience just to make it easier to develop is a bad tool. It's a tool for the lazy.

Well, maybe, but this is also a great tool for the enterprise that wants a consistent look and feel across their supported range of devices with one code base. Probably the biggest problem with PG is that it's frequently used with JQM, which in my opinion (after over a year of development with this combo) is slow. Mostly because it's browser compatibly goal is too broad. I'd really like to see a mobile optimized vers…

Great point. I started out with JQM early on and had to drop it. I ended up just pulling some of the touch event handling code from JQM since that was the only part still being used.

Re: How to get that native iOS feel with PhoneGap

#37

Post by exogen »

mephju wrote: post #22

So much wasted effort to achieve something which a) doesn't really work well b) comes for free if you just go native. And your Android users will of course be super happy to find a bad iOS interface which is just slow. And once you are done imitating the iOS interface, the real work only begins ;)

Trust me, these tips are still useful.

My team is working with a company whose site is just shy of the top 100 in the US by traffic. Big company, been around for almost 100 years. What surprised us was that 50% of their traffic comes from mobile browsers. They even already have mobile apps for both iOS and Android, and still that much traffic goes to their mobile site. Also of interest: iPad users get the normal site. So 50% of their traffic is from phones.

What do you serve to those people? Bug them to get the app anyway? On large sites involving several different divisions of a company, the native app probably only has 10% of the functionality. And serving the full "desktop" web experience might not be possible or desirable.

While I think it can be a huge mistake to try to completely mimic a native app on the web, you can make the experience much better by at least adopting some mobile UI patterns. And in those cases, the tips on this list will save you. (Our work with this company involved adding stuff to both their "desktop" and mobile sites. We didn't use PhoneGap, but did use several of the tricks on this list.)

As an aside, almost all of these tips have nothing to do with PhoneGap. They all apply just as well to any mobile site that's going to be using transitions to look like an app.

Re: How to get that native iOS feel with PhoneGap

#38

Post by tomkin »

jmitcheson wrote: post #23

Why do people hate on PhoneGap so much? Specifically, I mean when people complain that the UI of the apps produced with PhoneGap don't "feel" right. PhoneGap sacrifices the quality of the UI for benefits in other areas (a boost to development speed, and making it easier for a novice developer to get started). The argument against PhoneGap seems to be either that there isn't a place at all for such a technique, or tha…

I've noticed this, too. The arguments are more recently drawing around how the UX harms users...but wouldn't this be true of any HTML5 app? Does PhoneGap have some voodoo magic abilities to ruin the UX beyond what any HTML5 app is capable of? Otherwise, are you saying HTML5 apps are bad? PhoneGap is a wrapper that provides native-API to HTML5 apps. It doesn't automatically add horrible UI or whatever people think it does.

Crap PhoneGap apps and crap native apps are no different from each other.

Re: How to get that native iOS feel with PhoneGap

#39

Post by b3b0p »

We use PhoneGap and thought it would fit well for us since our app is a touch based board game. We don't really use native widgets. It's all customized graphics for the game board and menu screen.

I probably wouldn't use PhoneGap for an actual application that needed the native widgets look and feel, but for something like we are aiming for, I think it fits perfectly. We wanted to target as many platforms as possible.

Re: How to get that native iOS feel with PhoneGap

#40

Post by localhost3000 »

veeti wrote: post #24
jmitcheson wrote: post #23

Why do people hate on PhoneGap so much? Specifically, I mean when people complain that the UI of the apps produced with PhoneGap don't "feel" right. PhoneGap sacrifices the quality of the UI for benefits in other areas (a boost to development speed, and making it easier for a novice developer to get started). The argument against PhoneGap seems to be either that there isn't a place at all for such a technique, or tha…

> PhoneGap sacrifices the quality of the UI for benefits in other areas You said it yourself. PhoneGap is an easy way to get a sub-par user experience and that is what matters the most, not development speed.

in my experience more often than not the only people who can tell a well-done app is phonegap/cordova rather than native are nit-picky, self-righteous developers. if it works as advertised, users are generally happy and cannot tell the difference... and, unless your app is built specifically for developers, that's all that really matters.
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