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Comment by dc-tech-fan | Hacker News Reader

I'm giving Phonegap a try to make the mobile version of http://doodleordie.com. Thoughts/recommendations/inspirational success stories with Phonegap?

Of course Native is better but the Doodle or Die fans want a mobile app now and Phonegap seems like a quick win because I know JS well and I don't know Java or Objective C.

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I've done iOS applications natively and with PhoneGap. The apps that I did with PhoneGap have only been deployed to iOS so there hasn't been a lot of benefit in developing with PhoneGap. I'd say development time was roughly 1:1. If those apps get deployed to other platforms, then it's a huge win.

To get the experience I wanted on PhoneGap I've benefitted from being able to work natively. And I've also needed to develop functionality that didn't exist as plugins, which being able to jump to obj-c helped with too.

I'm writing an application in it at the moment, experimenting with Parse and it's been a great experience. You can use a mixture of both native controls and HTML5, see the NativeControls plugin. I'm using a native UITabBar and the UIWebView for the HTML5 / jQuery (native developers seem be building this way now anyway (FB etc)).

I just learned about NativeControls today. From what I saw, it only provides Toolbar and TabBar but doesn't do Navigation, for example, am I right?

UIActionSheet, UIStatusBar, UIToolBar and UITabBar I think. What are you looking for?

I'd love to be able to have a web view for the "content" of my app, but native navigation at the top, and native everything else basically.

I may have misunderstood, but can't you use the UIWebView (PhoneGap uses this by default for rendering) for HTML5/Cordova assets with the native UIToolBar at the top? (that's what I'm doing, but with UITabBar) Everything else can be done using native UIActionSheets.

What is Parse ? Do you have a URL ? thanks in advance !

https://parse.com/ ;)

I'm also interested in this.

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