PhoneGap 2.0 – Getting Started

As you may already know PhoneGap 2.0 was released last Friday. This is a major release that brings some new features and lots of changes around the way you create and setup your development environment. For example to create a new iOS/PhoneGap project you don’t use a wizard from Xcode anymore; now you need to launch a bash script from command line. Below you will find two short video tutorials that demonstrate how to get started for both Android and iOS platforms. Also after the videos you can find some additional steps that I had to go through in order to get everything running properly. I know these steps may not be necessary for all. I’ve tested it also on my colleague’s less polluted Mac and everything worked out of the box 😉
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Fixing flickers & jumps of jQuery Mobile transitions in PhoneGap apps

Recently I have been working on a mobile app that uses jQuery Mobile 1.1.0 as a UI framework. In general I’ve had really good experience with jQuery Mobile except it gave me some headaches when it came to page transitions. Some really weird flickers and jumps started to popup when I deployed it on the iOS 5.x platform as a PhoneGap app. This was something I didn’t experience when the same code was running in a device browser. After a few hours of digging into the issue I came up with a workaround that I didn’t find anywhere else and that solved all my problems :) I actually have seen all kinds of fixes to similar issues but I think this one is least invasive, because it doesn’t involve any framework code tweaks.
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HTML5 for App Developers: PhoneGap Build

Below you can find a short video tutorial on how to quickly get up and running with the PhoneGap Build service. PhoneGap Build allows you to compile and package your PhoneGap/Cordova apps for different platforms using an online service. This is especially useful when you are doing iOS development and you don’t have access to a Mac machine and Xcode. The same thing also applies if you would want to publish your app to Windows Phone devices and you are not a PC gal or guy 😉
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JavaScript Prototypal inheritance for class’ical developers

Developers who are learning JavaScript and have prior experience with strongly typed classical languages like Java, C#, or C++ often have trouble using the JavaScript inheritance model. Some even think that JavaScript doesn’t support inheritance at least that’s what I thought when I first learned it. Well, I was completely wrong!
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Intro to BackStack a Backbone.js views navigation library

Recently I’ve been working on several projects using PhoneGap/Cordova. These projects had a common requirement, and that was to have a custom UI look while preserving the interactions and feel that are common to mobile devices. Because of the custom UI look requirement I didn’t want to use any of the available mobile UI frameworks like jQuery Mobile, Sencha Touch, or jQTouch. Of course, those frameworks are really great and can save you ton of work, but at the same time they come with their own look-and-feel that often can be hard to re-skin to achieve what the app designer has proposed. That is why I decided to stick with pure HTML/CSS elements as much as possible and in some cases to build missing components from scratch. That is how BackStack came to life. In few simple words BackStack is an extension for Backbone.js that allows you to navigate between app views with nice mobile-style slide transitions, fade transitions, and no-effect transitions.
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Welcome to the outof.me

I would like to welcome everyone on my new blog at outof.me. Some of you may know me from my old site, riaspace.com. I decided to move to this new address because I felt that having a buzzword in my domain name wasn’t really the greatest idea. Technologies and buzzwords come and go, and sometimes you get stuck with a word in your blog’s name that may have lost its meaning. That is why I’ve moved to outof.me. The name is totally independent, and it will let me write about not only technologies but also about my other interests and hobbies. Of course, technology is part of my lifestyle and work so you can expect most of my posts will still be about it, but don’t be surprised if I publish something really unrelated.

You may be wondering what I have planned. Well, recently I have been deep in some HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript and PhoneGap projects (ugh buzzwords again ;)). So, you can expect a lot of really interesting and valuable content around these topics. :)

Stay tuned!

BTW: Are you curious about why I picked outof.me with its TLD (top level domain) pointing to Montenegro? Well there is no good answer. I have been brainstorming about a good name for quite some time. Obviously my last name and even my first name were not really good candidates especially for my non-Polish speaking subscribers (which is most of you). To be honest, even for Poles my last name is sometimes too difficult! 😉