Friday, August 05, 2011

PhoneGap Is The Present and Future on iOS, but on Android...

I've been developing applications for computers since 2005, 3 years ago I've started developing mobile applications for Windows Mobile. I felt in love with mobile development since then. When iOS came out I couldn't go for it because of two things, first: Objective-C, I have a big problem with C languages, I hate C and I can't develop on it, also Objective-C is a lot worst than standard C. Second: I had to have a Mac and on those days I hated Macs and I was one of those Linux fanboys.
Then Google released their own mobile operating system, named Android, shipping on the HTC Dream(G1), yeah! That antique device. Since then a lot changed in my programming life, I bought a iPod Touch(June, last year), got a Motorola Droid(September, last year), bought an iPad... And this year I bought my first Mac, in January, and I really felt in love with it, since then I've started to search about iOS development and I was wondered about a great project called PhoneGap, which enables me to develop fully native applications using web languages, such as HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript(and all those great frameworks for it). I've developed some easy and "crappy" applications like NerdyDots, and some "great" applications like Dream.In.Code News. It's so simple to make the applications using web technologies rather than compiled languages, you also get more liberty to customize the app more.
So since June I've started my campaign on Android development using PhoneGap. And the first final result of this was the XDA TV application(for Tablets and for Phones). But I've encountered a lot of problems that make it a lot more difficult to develop for than iOS. First one was that Android(on WebView and neither the Browser) has no support to the overflow: auto property, so I got to use a framework called iScroll, which is very very buggy. The second problem I had is that Android has no support for HTML5 video(just on WebView, on the Browser it works great), so you need to make some very user-unconfortable things to make the things work, which is to redirect the user to the Browser app and set it's href to the video, so it will make the Video app open and the user can watch the video.
I want to warn that those problems have nothing to do with PhoneGap, but with the Android operating system it self and incompatibilities with the WebView component. Google should seriously consider making changes on their WebView and Browser compatibilities to make the user experience better and the programmers(that use PhoneGap and other frameworks) life easier. So this is a present and a future for iOS, but for Android it's just the future(if Google invests on fixing this problems).

How the Editor of Windows Magazine Became an Apple Fanboy

I’ve been in denial for a while, but it hit me so hard yesterday that I finally have to admit it: I’m an Apple fanboy. Once you hear my story, you’ll agree that if it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone.

Cult Of Mac