I want to build a simple app where everything is offline and mostly it is an informational app with info pages and list pages. What is the best way to build an HTML5 app for it so I can easily port it to different platforms? I'm looking for a free solution.
This developer had an HTML5 app so he just converted it to and Android app as mentioned in the answer: Convert HTML5 into standalone Android App. So, is that the way to go if I'm building one from scratch? Would it be just as easy to convert it to iOS?
Also, how does performance look for such an app on Android/iOS/Windows Phone? I mean would the page sliding animation and stuff be just as fluid as a native app given that it is so simple?
Give PhoneGap a shot. It's probably the most popular platform that allows you to create mobile apps utilizing a browser, and it's free to use :)
Related
I am having mobile compatible website, it is highly responsive and do all what I need in mobile.
I just like to have an android/ios application, either it can represent my website as container.
Do we have any tool for the same. Is there any way to achieve it, as I do not want to use any mobile hardware like camera, geolocation and any other.
If any container of android or ios can provide a simple interface by opening my site in it, it will be a great option.
Kindly share your view on the same.
Have a look at this article about layouts.
A mobile application provides a different user experience than a mobile website. In your case if you don't want to use the mobile version of your site in the browser, then you need to create an application with a native UI.
For Android:
In my opinion, you should consider using the Empty Activity template from Android Studio to add a WebView inside it that will point to your website.
For iOS:
Seems like iOS Dev kit has the same kind of view.
For Windows Universal Apps:
Their Dev Kit has it as well.
Alternative:
If you feel more comfortable with web technologies, you can consider using Apache Cordova to build a mobile app from web sources.
Conclusion
All the native solutions presented are not that hard to implement (Less than a few hours), they just need you to play a little bit around with the native developing.
Cordova, the web-to-mobile solution, would also need you to play around with it.
Happy mobile developing !
I wanted to get a more experienced opinion on something I recently found out. A couple of months ago I set a goal to build myself a mobile app, and the first thing I did was go to developer.android.com and begin reading documentation on how to go about doing this.
I've invested a lot of time in understanding Android Studio and how to make simple apps (and I'm just now getting the hang of it all), but I just recently read about frameworks like PhoneGap(which let web devs who know HTML,CSS, and Javascript make apps too).
Before learning Android, I taught myself web dev through the Odin Project, which taught me a fair amount of HTML, CSS, and Javascript (little iffy on this language, but I'm sure it's something I could pick up easily since I already have a bit of experience).
I'm wondering what you guys feel are the limitations of using these frameworks and whether I should switch over to them, as opposed to continuing with Android since things are beginning to click for me.
Thanks!
I have developed apps for both Android and Phonegap. Phonegap takes advantage of your web development experience and lets you build mobile apps with ease. But it's not a replacement for Android API itself. A good phonegap application requires knowledge about web development and Android API.
However if your aim is to develop an android application, and you are comfortable with web development and Android, I would advice to take Android API.
Phonegap as wonderful as it is for web developers, and startups who can't afford to have dedicated resources for Android, iOS separately, has its limitations.
Performance : Phonegap app's performance is not at par with a native
android application.
Functionality : As one would expect you can't have all the functionality support a native android application has.
Look : You could easily tell apart a phonegap application from a native one. Given phonegap renders all the content in a webview, the look of native ui elements is lost
I think you will always need access to the native API to make good apps.
At least the navigation should be native, so that your app has the look and feel that the user expects, and so that stuff like the back button get correctly handled for you.
Even if there is some plugin that does that for you in a perfect way, I believe it's beneficial to know how Android works.
In the end, frameworks like PhoneGap add a layer inside your app rather than removing one, and it's always better to understand what goes on inside your app.
So the time that you've spent learning native Android won't be lost.
However, it makes sense to use HTML/JS if you want to share code between different platforms.
I think this article from Basecamp shows a very compelling example: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3743-hybrid-sweet-spot-native-navigation-web-content.
What I am trying to do might not be quite difficult but I am confusing myself. I am trying to build an app only for Android that will play videos for my company.
As I am not an native Android developer what I did is using html, jquery and phonegap to create and bundle my app as a web view which will help the end user installing the app instead of going to a URL and then open it.
Now here the challenge starts for me, I am looking for touch optimized design which should look like a native app. I can use twitter bootstrap , foundation or any other CSS framework to make my design responsive. I also know how to make ajax based animated page loading which will help me in preventing complete page load.
The real issue: is css the only and right way to design a mobile app? Does apps like Facebook , Youtube also make use of Css to design their native apps?
I do not want to use jquery mobile because I simply don't like their design patterns.
Again, my question might seems to be foolish. What I want to use are industry standard tools to build my app, even if I have to dig into Android tutorials and learn it from scratch.
Any help ,links or guidance will be helpful.
Native apps do typically not use HTML/CSS, and instead use the widgets etc provided by the platform. That's what native means. Facebook recently switched from a web view/HTML5 implementation to native (at least on Android).
Even after searching PhoneGap's website and their support group, I still cannot find an answer to my question:
Currently, I'm planning on developing an application that should exists as a pure HTML5 application, being able to run in any modern browser (Google Chrome, Safari, etc.) as well as on Android/iPad as native mobile applications.
So my question is:
Is it possible to use the same code base to develop both pure HTML5 applications as well as native mobile applications with PhoneGap?
PhoneGap is in effect a runtime environment for HTML, javascript, and any CSS that may accompany your code. So in short:
Yes, but it is recommended that you have some knowledge of Objective-C if you want to develop any iPhone app with extended functionality. If you have the right dimensions/proportions for the code there is no reason why you cannot simply copy that code into PhoneGap and compile it.
See, the support for #HTML5 varies from browser to browser, and varies a lot from a desktop browser to mobile browser. If one has to convert web-portal to a mobile application that can easily be done through Phonegap, you can refer to this link also. https://build.phonegap.com/ It worked fine for me.
Now lets come to Phonegap, what phonegap does is it has created wrapper through javascript that calls the native apis. Now to show content they use WebView object which renders your html5 page in your app. And you can create your own wrappers too. Not that much difficult.
So if your app is only a web based portal, that does not need much native access, you can easily reuse one codebase make #cross-platform apps using Phonegap. Else you need to go for hybrid apps.
I have been developing an Android application for about two months now, and the guy I'm writing it for wants me to use this instead of the android SDK so we can deploy the application for multiple smart phones: http://rhomobile.com/
he says you can write the application in one language and it can be deployed for most smart phones. Has anyone used this website to do something similar? Any advantages or disadvantages I should know about and tell him? Maybe someone could give me a better explanation on what this really does.
I'm current a one man army. He wants the application out for most smart phones but can afford to hire more developers.
Rhomobile will start up a small webserver on your phone and then show a webview that is directed to this webserver. You are able to write all the application logic in ruby in a way you would do it if you would write a web app that is deployed on a real web server. Rhomobile uses CSS etc. to have the app look look a little bit like a native app.
If you know Ruby you will get an App fast but it will look crappy and the user experience will be crappy too. A similar framework is appcelerator titanium they will let you write the app in Java Script and then compile it into a mix of javascript, webview and native components that run on an Iphone and on an Android phone and titanium has a much nicer user experience then rhomobile.
Visit their pages and test some of the apps that they are promoting as showcase for their frameworks.
As many developers writing apps in Objective C have learned using HTML for the view and styling with CSS styling libraries is a great way to create attractive native apps. Rhomobile's Rhodes uses this approach as well. We used to let people use whatever CSS they wanted and they could choose to use IUI, JQTouch, IWebKit, WebApp.net or any other library along with Rhodes. The best external apps all seemed to use JQTouch for styling and animated transitions.
Recently we decided to ship with our own fork of JQTouch (which we made work on Android) in order to make this even easier. The recent Rhodes master branch created apps with JQTouch builtin makes such attractive apps even easier to build, as the stylesheets are included with Rhodes scaffold-generated apps.