Using Parse and Trigger.io for cross-platform apps without pain in the back-end | Hacker News Reader

Using Parse and Trigger.io for cross-platform apps without pain in the back-end

trigger.io

75 pointsblueski12 comments

I'll have to try this out. When I was using cross-platform frameworks over a year and half ago (which is a long long time ago), they weren't very good. It seems like lots of cross-platform frameworks have made headway since then.

From a cursory glance, it seems like it should be easy enough to use. Though I have a question. What happens on errors? One of my big frustrations from before was that underlying iOS errors would bubble up and I'd spend hours digging around in iOS, trying to figure out what the error really was talking about. It required an understanding of how iOS/Android apps were put together.

I've played with Trigger.io's Forge and can tell you as far as crashes and debugging, they provide a webservice that your app can report to, and you can monitor it in real time. That being said...

After playing with Trigger (or Forge is the actual product) I was rather disappointed.

somethings I've observed: 1) Forge is NOT free - You have to pay $50 A MONTH to remove their branding. Which is a big splash screen that is shown for about 3 seconds when the app is launched. This producing a terrible waiting period (not sure if they are doing work in the bg) but it defiantly doesn't feel as snappy as it could. Am I'm not paying $50 to find out.

2) I saw nothing that supports their claim 5x performance than phonegap. I've built a fair share of native and web wrapper apps. If anything it was a little laggy'er.

3) It's early in its life, many features are actually not cross platform. Many things only working in android or iOS.

I;m still sticking with phonegap. It's a way more mature system. And its Fee.

Trigger.io looks very nice but I totally agree with you, the 50$/month is really a huge issue for indie dev who just want to play around with iPhone app making. You can't just release an app with a huge ad at each start, even if it's just for fun :/

Thanks for the feedback. We definitely want to support indie devs, and will add tiers to reflect that soon.

Our current pricing is more targeted at enterprises, web dev studies and funded startups.

I'll definitly take a closer look if you release more interesting pricing tiers for us. Your product look awesome, and well documented. Too bad there's not a simple way to test iOS apps on Windows (not your fault, of course ^^)

So if I make an app, and release it to the app store, and then cancel my account with Trigger, a splash screen starts when my users that already downloaded the app start it?

No, users who have already installed the app get the same experience as when they originally downloaded it.

And there's nothing automatic in our wrapper that 'calls back' to trigger.io and modifies the user experience based on that. We simply ask that if you continue distributing the app in the app stores that you pay the appropriate tier.

There are a few good options for debugging. Trigger has the Catalyst debugging tool which brings a Webkit-style debugging interface to mobile development (https://trigger.io/catalyst/). You can run apps in the simulator and on connected devices then remotely view the DOM and debug Javascript in the web interface.

Trigger can also generate web apps (http://current-docs.trigger.io/web/index.html), so when not using native phone functionality (e.g. the camera) you might like to debug with a web app and use Chrome/Firefox developer tools in your desktop browser.

With liberal use of forge.logging (http://current-docs.trigger.io/api/logging.html) these techniques should be useful! I think you'll find things have progressed since you last used cross-platform frameworks. Any questions do drop us a line on support@trigger.io.

I'm always going to favour PhoneGap over Trigger.io because of PhoneGap's plugin community. It's also relatively easy to make plugins yourself- I've been hacking around at adding the Spotify API recently. Being a paid product, it's unlikely that Trigger.io are going to get the same level of support from hackers that PhoneGap has.

Could you see what is going on with the first weather demo tutorial. I want to try your service out, however I can't download the resources.zip from the tutorial, I am returned a 404. Very excited to develop an app using your service!

Thanks so much for letting us know! Fixed now. Hope you enjoy building with Trigger.io - let us know how you get on :)

Development seems to be moving along pretty rapidly & they've managed to integrate a bunch of popular frameworks: backbone.js, zepto.js, spine.js, Sencha Touch, jQuery, jQuery Mobile, underscore.js ...

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