Phonegap?

Very nice apps have been built with tools like PhoneGap, and it certainly makes sense to use cross-platform tools for a number of reasons. Usually, though, you will achieve the best results using native tools and languages. You also need to be aware that with cross-platform apps, you often can't follow the recommended (and expected) user interface guidelines for each platform, which can frustrate users. For example, iOS and Android have different strategies for in-app navigation, and porting iOS navigation to an Android app can really alienate users and cause bad reviews.

But, I think Randy raised some good points about how web technologies can be used effectively, and I think they will get more and more viable in the future. But for now (and the next few years, at least), you just can't beat native with platform-tailored user experiences.

Also, while we don't cover PhoneGap or anything like it, we have talked about featuring it in a workshop or something, and feedback like this helps us know what you the members want, so thanks!

It's interesting because Facebook abandoned their HTML5 apps and went native. There are probably a ton of reasons we'll never know about but that decision probably speaks to a lot of typical situations. If you can build a native app (and afford to maintain different codebases) then it's a better strategy IMHO.

Regarding the Facebook app, I would recommend reading the article "The Making of Fastbook". The authors discuss in depth a lot of the things that the Facebook app did wrong and developed a new version on Sencha Touch that improves it quite a bit.

The article is great to show that getting HTML5 to work in the context of a native wrapper is hard. You probably don't want to write HTML/CSS/JS yourself and then wrap it Phonegap for anything much more than static content with links. Instead, you probably want to use a framework like Sencha Touch that will handle a lot of interactivity and performance/scaling issues.

hi all , does anyone know when treehouse will come up with the new phonegap tutorial . badly waiting for one .

Of course native is better, no doubt about it. Facebook is a good example. They have unlimited resources and can hire any developer in the world to write any app they imagine. So they most probably get it done in the best possible way. For them. I wish I had a client like that. And the time to learn a couple of new programming languages. But learning a new language is neither necessary nor do I have the resources. As you say: "If you can ..." What I can do, and what every other html/php/JS developer can do, is learn to use something like phonegap. And Treehouse can help us learn ... Anyway, it would also be useful to know exactly what the advantages of one way is over the other. Probably native apps run faster. Probably phonegap does not support all features of all phones. But surely it is much cheaper and faster to use phonegap if the app is supposed to run on many different devices. That's a big advantage, if the performance of the app is not essential.

Thanks Randy. I had heard of Sencha Touch before, thanks for the reminder. I do need a bit more than static links. Will check it out. The Fastbook article is an interesting read, indeed.

Hopefully the performance issues continue to improve. I'd also like to point out two related topics you might be interested in:

Device APIs Working Group

Firefox OS