PhoneGap and Why I've Been Busy
- Jan 15, 2013 at 11:56 PM
- Shawn Wildermuth
- 10 Comments
My PhoneGap series will continue soon. I promise. I’ve been busy working on a new business: How to Watch. This new business aims to help people find where a movie or TV show is available via online streaming (e.g. Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Instant or iTunes). I got sick of having to search on each of the platforms to find "my stories". The result is this site and mobile apps (Android, Windows 8, Windows Phone and Kindle; iOS is coming soon if I can get Apple to certify the thing!).
One of the goals of the project was to build the core product (the search UI) once and reuse it using PhoneGap to build all the apps. With some tweaks here and there that is what I accomplished. I am using Adobe's PhoneGap Build to build the iOS and Android/Kindle apps for me (check it out). And I am hand-building the Windows 8 and Windows Phone PhoneGap apps (because of special needs that PhoneGap doesn't accommodate).
One way this works is that I am using a responsive design so that on the phone the app get a phone-centric look and feel; and on tablets and desktops you get a fuller, more horizontal look and feel. Much of the responsive design comes from my use of Twitter Bootstrap. As I finish up the PhoneGap series (and an upcoming Pluralsight course on it), you can learn the nitty gritty details of what I've learned.
All I ask is that you take a look and let me know if you find it useful:
Comments
bfs Wednesday, January 16, 2013
Looking forward to watching the series on Pluralsight!
David Wednesday, January 16, 2013
Great idea - addresses a major pain point; I was frustrated with the same thing. Just tried the web app...autocomplete would be nice. Also for autocomplete and the ultimate search results, curating/organizing would be nice. E.g. top two rests for "Homeland" returns the TV show and the movie, with each season a sub-result of the first. Probably not easy, but along th lines of what you're trying to solve for people.
dw_roth Thursday, January 17, 2013
Nice, definitely useful app. Also will be looking forward to your new phonegap course and I enjoyed your first phonegap course.
Shawn Wildermuth Thursday, January 17, 2013
David,I have a fix for that problem in our test server. Should be live in the next day or two. Thanks!
Shawn Wildermuth Thursday, January 17, 2013
dw_roth,Thanks but the existing course isn't mine... but glad you liked it anyway.
Raciel Friday, January 18, 2013
Hi Shawn, I was wondering if you considered Xamarin at all. Coming from a no so good experience with Appcelerator we are looking at Xamarin now.
Shawn Wildermuth Friday, January 18, 2013
Raciel,I considered Xamarin. Love their products! They are closer to a native app dev experience. You can use C# but the platform code is all different (UIs too) but it's native. They might be where we go if we need native...but for us, PhoneGap helped with time to market.
Leave a Comment
Search Blog
My Courses
Ready
to start building Windows Phone 8 Applications? This is the book for you. I teach you how to build apps using Windows Phone 8. Order today!
Have the book? You can get the downloads and errata here.
Hosting provided by:
Oran Wednesday, January 16, 2013
You can save a round-trip by having the Search button go to /s/ instead of /s which is redirecting to /s/. I also had zoom issues turning the home page to landscape on my iPhone.I'm looking forward to more PhoneGap posts based on your experience building this! I'm curious to know the Windows Phone build limitation.