Simplest way to build apps for Windows Phone | Hacker News Reader

Simplest way to build apps for Windows Phone

trigger.io

59 pointsamirnathoo13 comments

I know it's not quite the same thing, but PhoneGap does Windows Phone too: http://phonegap.com/about/features

======= Boo-hoo! This video can’t be played with your current setup. Please switch to a browser that provides native H.264 support or install Adobe Flash Player. =======

Well... I might build apps for any phone, cool, but I cannot play your screencast on my android. The codec is not available on Android 2.2.

<video> tag _only_ supports h264 in android 2.2, it should work fine. their site's incorrectly detecting your browser or your Android vendor screwed up bigtime... or both. Galaxy S for example has some browser quirks[1].

[1] http://www.broken-links.com/2010/07/08/making-html5-video-wo...

$299 / month? Doesn't seem worth it to me.

I'd rather click one button instead of typing 3 lines but that's just me

That's coming with our UI toolkit :) https://trigger.io/forge/toolkit/

Will this let me do Windows Phone development on a Mac? I seem to remember reading about Trigger.io letting you do iPhone development on a PC.

Not yet, we'll work on that... though of course you can install a Windows 7 partition on your Mac which is how I did the screencast

One thing I love about PhoneGap that I kind of hate about all of these different "compile in the cloud" platforms, is I like have the actual source and being able to compile on my local machine.

If your cloud compile infrastructure is down or I don't have a net connection, I can't compile my app and test on device. To me that is actually worse.

I'm a developer and I can figure out how to setup an xcode or Android or WP7 app. It's not hard, especially if the app just has a single web view.

I realize these features only exist to appease Windows only shops who want to make iOS apps, but don't want to buy Macs, but if you want to build iOS apps, buy a mac. You want to make Windows Phone apps, buy a PC.

Trigger.io looks cool and all, but give me local compile and the actual project code. Otherwise, you've made my dev experience worse, not better.

That's fair enough: part of our design philosophy is to not require setup for local compiles since our goal is to appeal to devs who value that.

That comes with trade-offs as you mention, the requirement to have a network connection to interact with a cloud build service.

amirnathoo: the trigger.io website mentions a cloud build service to compete with the PhoneGap Build API, but I can't seem to find any more details. Could you point me in the right direction please?

Absolutely!

You interact with our cloud build service via our command line tools - signup at https://trigger.io/forge to download that

Or our UI Toolkit: https://trigger.io/forge/toolkit/

Devs seem to prefer those methods than uploading code into some kind of web form. If you want information about how our cloud build service works, here's an overview: http://trigger.io/cross-platform-application-development-blo...

Thank you

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