Archived Blog
All the old blog posts, written from 2008 to 2017
Filtering posts by author: Andrew Trice
Updated: Parallax Effects in Hybrid/Web Apps
A while back I wrote about adding parallax effects to your HTML/JS experiences to make them feel a bit richer and closer to a native experience. I've just added this subtle (key word *subtle*) effect to a new project and made a few changes I wanted to share here. If...
IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation v7.0 Now Available!
It's here! IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation v7.0 is now available. Get the FREE developer edition here, and the v7.0 docs here. This release features: Integrated single-node Cloudant (NoSQL) DB. Detection for tampered/hacked apps Code obfuscation in hybrid apps Enhanced data adapter services REST services with analytics for all data adapter...
Strategies for Managing App Versions & Updates With IBM MobileFirst Foundation (aka Worklight)
IBM MobileFirst Foundation provides two mechanisms to manage app versions and updates. Neither requiring you to write any additional code! The first is app versioning; MobileFirst Foundation tracks each version of an app that you deploy, and gives you the ability govern or restrict access to specific platforms and versions. App versioning applies to all...
Embarking Upon A New Adventure
I'm excited to finally announce that I have embarked upon a new adventure! Today marks my first day as a MobileFirst Developer Advocate for IBM! So, what does that mean? It is very similar to what I was doing back at Adobe focusing on developers. I'm excited to engage with...
DevNexus 2014 PhoneGap Presentations
I've just wrapped up my presentations for this year's DevNexus event in Atlanta – it has been a great event, filled with tons of information on web, mobile, and back-end development. I had 3 sessions on PhoneGap – One intro, one advanced, and one a mobile frameworks panel. Below are...
Automating PhoneGap Builds
I've recently had several conversations with PhoneGap users around processes for automating the compilation of PhoneGap. This could be either in automated tasks using Grunt, Ant, Maven, or any other task manager, or could be in continuous integration environments like Jenkins CI. If you're interested in this, here are a few options… First...
Generating a PDF Inside of a PhoneGap App
A while back, I was asked if it's possible to generate PDF documents inside of PhoneGap apps… The answer is definitely yes, and it's not that hard at all! I used the JSPDF library, which has a comprehensive JavaScript API for generating PDF documents. Here's a quick and easy sample…...
Couldn't make it to the Adobe CreateNow Tour? Guess what, you're still in luck!
If you couldn't make it to the recently concluded Adobe CreateNow tour don't worry, you can still view it online! Check out this playlist on YouTube to see a recording of the entire New York CreateNow event. You'll see the latest and greatest from all of Adobe's creative tools.
PhoneGap Presentations from HTML5DevConf
I was searching the web earlier this week for an older presentation from a few months back, and just happened to stumble across my recent presentations from HTML5DevConf from this past October. Looks like the videos were posted in November, but I'm just seeing them now. I had two sessions: Designing and Architecting...
New UI Article and Architectural Presentation on PhoneGap
A couple of PhoneGap related activities I've been up to recently… First, an article I recently wrote on Creating a Card-based UI in PhoneGap has been published on DZone. Be sure to check it out for some tips on creating the user interface, all with just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript....
HTML5 Dev Conf Wrap-up: Snap.svg, Visual Storytelling & PhoneGap
HTML5 Developer Conference just wrapped up in San Francisco, and it was a great event. There was a lot to see and hear from the entire HTML/JS community. Adobe showed off some amazing showcases of the work that is being done with rich layout on the web and released an...
PhoneGap & Hardware Session Video now Available
The recording for my session “PhoneGap and Hardware” from PhoneGap Day back in July is now available! Be sure to check it out. There were apparently some issues with the audio, but you can still hear everything. I'd like to express a huge Thank You to everyone who attended, and to...
Status Tap/Scroll To Top in PhoneGap Apps on iOS
One criticism of PhoneGap apps that I sometimes hear is that they often don't have “standard” features from the native operating system. Little things, like iOS's ability to scroll a container back to the top, just by tapping on the operating system's status bar. These types of features are not...
New Version of My Halloween PhoneGap App
With Halloween less than a month away, I figured it's about time to update my “Instant Halloween” PhoneGap sound effects app. I'm happy to say that the latest version is now out for both iOS and Android. It has a few new sounds, a new UI style, and has been...
Porting A PhoneGap App To Firefox OS
About a year ago I released the Fresh Food Finder, a multi-platform mobile application built with PhoneGap. The Fresh Food Finder provides an easy way to search for farmer's markets near your current location, based on the farmer's markets listings from the USDA. This app has seen a lot of...
PhoneGap Day: PhoneGap & Hardware
I'd like to express a huge Thank You to everyone who attended PhoneGap Day in Portland last week, and to Colene and the team that put everything together! The day was loaded with fantastic presentations, and great community interaction… tons of information, tons of great questions, and tons of great people...
Fresh Food Finder Featured in SELF Magazine
I am very excited to share that the Fresh Food Finder PhoneGap application which I built last summer was recently featured in the June 2013 issue of SELF Magazine. This app was built as a demonstration/sample application for PhoneGap, but has gained popularity for being an easy way to find...
PhoneGap Exploration – Realtime Hardware Communication
Recently I've undertaken some explorations with fellow evangeslit Kevin Hoyt, trying to determine how far we can push PhoneGap applications with devices and physical computing. Turns out, you can push things really far and now I'm delighted to share one of the experiments that we've been pursuing. I've been asked on more...
PhoneGap & Android Studio
Yesterday at GoogleIO, Google announced Android Studio, a new development environment for authoring Android applications. This is a great looking new IDE for Android, based off of IntelliJ IDEA, with some new Android-specific tools and features. You can read more about Android Studio on the Google Android Developers blog. One...
PhoneGap Legends – A Sample Game App
Next week I'll be representing Adobe at GDC 2013, and demonstrating how Adobe Creative Cloud, PhoneGap, and PhoneGap Build can be great tools for building casual gaming experiences. In preparation, I've been working on a gaming sample application that shows off the potential of HTML games packaged with PhoneGap. …and now I'd like...
On-Device Debugging With PhoneGap & iOS 6
Want to debug your PhoneGap apps, complete with breakpoints, DOM & CSS inspection, profiling, and more? This is all possible with the PhoneGap Emulator, which allows you to leverage Chrome's Developer Tools inside of the desktop Chrome browser (covered in detail here). However, did you also know that you can have a...
Performance & UX Considerations For Successful PhoneGap Apps
I think some of the most common questions people ask when developing PhoneGap apps are about performance. How do I make my app faster? How do I make it feel native? Any tips of making an app feel at-home on a particular platform? How do you match native OS “look...
Video: Intro To PhoneGap from MobileDev@TU
Thanks to everyone who came out the the MobileDev@TU meetup last night at Towson University. I've posted the video online for those that want to review it, or weren't able to attend. You can check it out below. Unfortuantely I lost the last 15 minutes of video because I...
Featured PhoneGap Apps!
It's always exciting to see what people in the PhoneGap community area up to. Seeing featured apps in both iTunes and Google Play that are built with PhoneGap is fantastic. Keep up the great work everyone! BitTimer is being featured for iOS Health apps: HealthTap is being featured in Google Play...
Video: Introduction to PhoneGap
Yesterday I gave an Introduction To Mobile Development With PhoneGap presentation at the DevNexus developer conference in Atlanta. Thanks to everyone who attended, DevNexus is a great event. Unfortunately, not everyone around the world was able to attend… maybe next year. Luckily for you, I recorded the presentation! You can...
Transcript from Open Session On PhoneGap
Ray and I have just concluded another Adobe TechLive Open Session on PhoneGap. These sessions are an opportunity for anyone to stop in and ask us questions. Thanks to everyone who attended and submitted their questions. We will be hosting more of these sessions in the future. You can also...
Video: Native vs. Hybrid vs. Web
Here's a video from the “What Developers Love and Hate about iOS, Android, Windows and HTML5″ panel discussion that I took part in during MoDev East back in December. The panelists represented native app developers, HTML/web developers, and myself-representing the HTML/hybrid app paradigm. I thought it was a great discussion, and...
My Workflow for Developing PhoneGap Applications
I am asked all the time “How do I get started developing PhoneGap applications?”. My normal answer is to advise people to check out the PhoneGap Getting Started Guides, which provide a great starting point for every platform. However after further thought, I'm not sure this is always what people...
Transcript from Open Session On PhoneGap
Today Raymond Camden and I hosted another open session on PhoneGap as part of an Adobe TechLive event. These sessions are an opportunity for anyone to stop in and ask us questions. The full transcript from today's session is below. Thanks to everyone for sticking around, and bearing through our technical...
Connected Second-Screen App Experiences with PhoneGap & Audio Watermarks
In January 2012, I started the year with a post on multi-screen applications developed with PhoneGap. In that post, I describe an approach for creating mobile applications that extend the app experience onto a second screen – where the mobile device drives the content on that second screen… essentially having...
Debugging On-Device PhoneGap Applications with “Charles” Network Proxy
Have you ever been testing or developing an application, and things just don't seem to be working as you've expected? Just imagine that the data that you are receiving from the server isn't exactly what you'd expect… even worse, what if this is happening in an application that you've already...
Halloween Fun with PhoneGap
About two weeks ago I had a random thought… “Wouldn't it be fun to build a free Halloween sound effects app using PhoneGap?” (I tend to get excited for any holiday). I had already done a lot of work using sounds in PhoneGap apps with my LowLatencyAudio native plugin, so...
Automated UI Testing in PhoneGap Apps
I normally don't write posts to talk about a specific product from another company, but this is the first product that I have seen which lets you do automated UI testing in PhoneGap applications, so I figured I'd share… Automated testing is often a critical step in enterprise application development....
Presentations From Dreamforce 2012
I recently returned from a great trip to San Francisco, CA, where I was able to attend Dreamforce - Salesforce.com‘s annual conference. Dreamforce is probably the biggest conference I've ever attended, with 90,000 registered attendees consuming the entire Moscone Center and all of downtown San Francisco. While only a small portion of...
PhoneGap, Apple Rejections & UI/UX Guidelines
I've recently encountered some grumblings from the development community that Apple has rejected their PhoneGap apps for not being “native enough”. By itself, that doesn't surprise me too much – Apple has very strict rules/guidelines on what they will and will not accept into the App Store. What did surprise...
Introducing “Walkable” – A New Sample App for PhoneGap
I'd like to take a moment and introduce “Walkable Restaurants” (or just “Walkable” as I like to call it), a new application that I built to demonstrate how to create PhoneGap applications using Backbone.js. Walkable Restaurants provides you with an easy way to find a bite to eat or refreshing...
Folding HTML Views in App-UI
A few months back I released App-UI, a UI container toolkit for creating HTML experiences. It gives you common “view navigator” paradigms for mobile experiences… a view navigator stack that can push and pop views, a split view navigator, and a “sliding view” like Facebook's iOS experience. All of...
Upcoming Changes with PhoneGap 2.1 & iOS 6
Are you using PhoneGap/Apache Cordova for iOS development? If so, you'll definitely want to pay attention to the upcoming PhoneGap 2.1 release. If you haven't seen it already, be sure to check out Shazron's post: 11 upcoming changes for Cordova iOS 2.1. Changes include Automatic Rererecnce Counting (ARC) support, an...
Transcript From Open Session on PhoneGap/Cordova
Many thanks to everyone who attended today's open session on PhoneGap hosted by myself, Raymond Camden, and Piotr Walczyszyn. Thank you for the great questions and feedback! You can access a full transcript from the open session below. Please ignore typos, it was a live Q&A session. Answered Questions (78)...
Using HTML/JS Templates to Generate More Than Just HTML
I recently worked on an application that was used to demonstrate the process of capturing data from a mobile application created using PhoneGap, and pushing that data into a LiveCycle server's workflow engine. Since my data was being captured and stored locally as JSON objects, I asked myself “why can't...
Enterprise Android Apps W/ PhoneGap
Here are my presentation slides and extra content from last night's DC Droids meetup. I gave the presentation “Enterprise Android Applications With PhoneGap“. There were excellent questions and conversations at last night's event – Thank you everyone for attending, and making it a great meetup. You can view the presentation...
Open Session on PhoneGap/Cordova
Do you have questions about PhoneGap and/or Apache Cordova that you'd like answered from Adobe? If so, here's your chance! On August 28th at 1:00 PM EDT (10:00 AM PDT) Adobe's technical evangelists will be hosting a two hour open session on Adobe Connect, where anyone can join and ask questions....
“Open With” in iOS PhoneGap Apps
Let's say that you have a PhoneGap app that has access to documents, but you want to open those documents in a different application outside of your PhoneGap application. For example, let's say you have a DRM-protected PDF document that gets authenticated by an Adobe LiveCycle server. On...
Presentations: Intro To PhoneGap, Web Data Viz & PhoneGap Native Plugins
As promised, here are my presentation slides and extra content from last week's RIACon conference. I gave three presentations: “Intro to PhoneGap”, “Data Visualization With Web Standards”, and “PhoneGap Native Plugins”. All of the presentations are freely available at: https://github.com/triceam/Presentations. Intro To PhoneGap Click to view presentation PhoneGap is an application...
Emulating PhoneGap/Cordova Apps in the Desktop Browser
Earlier this month the PhoneGap team held the first PhoneGap day. This was in part to celebrate the release of PhoneGap 2.0, but more importantly to bring together members of the PhoneGap community to share and learn from each other. There are great recaps of PhoneGap Day from RedMonk,...
PhoneGap 2.0 Released
PhoneGap 2.0 has just been released! This is a great step forward for PhoneGap, with a much improved developer experience. New and improved features in PhoneGap 2.0 include: Cordova WebView Command Line Tooling Enhanced documentation Web Inspector Remote (Weinre) ported to nodejs Cordovajs (Support for unified Javascript across platforms) Transition...
Questions and Myths About PhoneGap
When technology teams are making decisions of whether or not to adopt a mobile strategy revolving around PhoneGap, lots of questions arise. This is natural - investing in any technology is a big decision, and the proper course is to evaluate its strengths and weaknesses. Phonegap is a relatively new...
PhoneGap Explained Visually
I’ve been “out and about” lately, attending tech conferences, meetup groups, and meeting with developers in their offices, and I am getting great feedback on mobile development and PhoneGap. There are some common questions that I am often asked, and I hope this post helps everyone understand PhoneGap better. PhoneGap...