Comments on: Native UI Controls in PhoneGap coming along nicely

By: Alex

Alex — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:35:38 +0000

Great, makes a lot of sense. I will be taking the PhoneGap session in NYC so looking forward to delving deeper into this. Thanks again

By: Michael Nachbaur

Michael Nachbaur — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 20:14:52 +0000

PhoneGap-based applications don’t work if you load a different HTML page. They work as Ajax applications where you asynchronously load additional content using XMLHttpRequest. This is because there’s a great deal of initialization that happens when PhoneGap first launches your index.html file, and this isn’t done on subsequent page loads.

When I do this, I show/hide HTML

tags that take up the whole screen, and swap them out using CSS3 animations. If you want to use the native tab bar code, you only have to show the tab bar when you’re ready to.

By: Alex

Alex — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 23:17:56 +0000

Quick question, I am looking to have a login view that takes up the entire screen. Once i log in, i want it to you use your Tabbar. I was going about it by waiting for authentication on index.html and then going to tabbar.html once authenticated. Sort of the way traditional apps work. Everything works, but the tabbar doesn’t show up. Shows up fine if the tabbar is in index.html though. Should I be going about this another way? I am open to any solution

By: Alex

Alex — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 20:38:21 +0000

Sounds great, looking forward to it

By: Michael Nachbaur

Michael Nachbaur — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 21:25:02 +0000

It’s most likely going to get merged soon; it’s just a matter of sitting down with them and working out how we’re going to handle plugins like this in the future.

The advantages of going “Native” for core features such as navigation and alerts are twofold: a) your users are most comfortable dealing with UI elements that are part of the native operating system, and b) they’ll be more responsive to the user’s input.

Since PhoneGap has per-platform implementations of different javascript interfaces, it’s possible to create platform-specific implementations of the same UI concepts that are on the iPhone. So for Android you’d render native controls in such a way that users of that platform are most comfortable.

And if all else fails, you can always fall back to implementing that feature in native JavaScript/HTML.

This is all just theory at the moment however, since I’ve only developed for the iPhone personally.

By: Alex

Alex — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:58:03 +0000

Interested in Brad’s question also.

By: Brad Midgley

Brad Midgley — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 19:33:05 +0000

Mike, is the native approach something that might be merged into the main project or was it more like an experiment?

How does platform-independent application design fare using either the native or faked tab bar & nav bar? Is there an advantage to one or the other for making maintenance of a phonegap app easier?

By: Mike Nachbaur

Mike Nachbaur — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 16:33:00 +0000

Of course! I'd love to get as much feedback on this as possible. If you're new to git, you probably just cloned my master repo, and didn't pull down the "uicontrols" branch. To do this, go ahead and try:

mkdir phonegap
cd phonegap
git init
git remote add NachoMan git://github.com/NachoMan/phonegap.git
git pull NachoMan uicontrols

If you want to make any changes there, please feel free and email me any patches you come up with. Let me know what you think about it.

By: J. Matthew Pryor

J. Matthew Pryor — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 05:46:00 +0000

Any chance that I can test these mods out? I cloned the git code & run it from xCode but don't see the new native UI controls in the PhoneGap app? Thanks for any tips.