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Phonegap 2.0 released

phonegap.com

11–20 of 39 posts

Re: Phonegap 2.0 released

#11
post #7

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 t…

seconded

Re: Phonegap 2.0 released

#12
post #7

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 t…

>It lacked the fluidity and responsiveness you have with native apps.

Having only messed around with phonegap a little recently, I wasn't sure if this was a real issue or something I was doing wrong. Is the lack of responsiveness you describe a noticeable delay any time you try to interact with the app in any way? I made a trivial app that just has two pages, and switches between them when you click a button, and it was obviously, noticeably slow to react. Is that "normal" phonegap performance? I guess I am just hoping I did something wrong, because I don't see how anyone could possibly use phonegap if it really is that slow all the time.

Re: Phonegap 2.0 released

#13
post #7

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 t…

>It lacked the fluidity and responsiveness you have with native apps. Having only messed around with phonegap a little recently, I wasn't sure if this was a real issue or something I was doing wrong. Is the lack of responsiveness you describe a noticeable delay any time you try to interact with the app in any way? I made a trivial app that just has two pages, and switches between them when you click a button, and it…

While there are performance issues in Webkit vs Native, for the trivial example the issue is usually the default delay in generating a 'click' event. Browsers wait 300ms to see if you're attempting a doubletap. You want to use a framework, or write some code to detect 'touchstart' for clicks to register with a minimum of delay.

See https://developers.google.com/mobile/articles/fast_buttons

Re: Phonegap 2.0 released

#14
post #2

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."

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

Re: Phonegap 2.0 released

#15
post #7

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 t…

I've used it on a couple myself, paired with Sencha Touch, and I have to say it has been overall a very good experience. We were able to put out an Android and iOS version of our app in 2 months. Performance on older Android devices wasn't great, but on newer phones like the iPhone 4+ and Androids shipped within the last year, performance was damn close to native.

Re: Phonegap 2.0 released

#17
post #7

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 t…

Couldn't agree more. At the company I work for, we tried both Phonegap and Appcelerator Titanium and it both was a total disaster. We're back developing native apps and both the development and user experience is just so much better.

Re: Phonegap 2.0 released

#19
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.

Re: Phonegap 2.0 released

#20
post #7

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 t…

I agree. I spent about a few weeks cobbling together a prototype, but most of it was spent trying to get it look and feel native. That plus debugging is a nightmare.
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