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Comment by jh3 | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have any real world examples of Trigger.io apps? How's it compare to other services like PhoneGap?

I will be working on an iOS app shortly and am curious about Trigger.io. Parse looks like something I would definitely be able to use, but Trigger.io and the like make me uneasy. I don't want a crappy user experience.

So, has anyone created an app with Trigger that can be compared to or is indistinguishable from a native application (i.e. not HTML wrapped in a UIWebView)?

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I was working on an unpublished trigger app at OkCupid Labs until recently. There's one EPIC WIN vs phonegap, which is that you never need to fire up xcode or eclipse. Builds happen on the command line and are way faster than native app builds.

There's one downside that's pretty severe: it's impossible to write native ui components (outside of the few they offer). We didn't care.

> So, has anyone created an app with Trigger that [is] not HTML wrapped in a UIWebView?

Trigger is a way to create an app that is HTML wrapped in a UIWebView (and has access to native camera apis, etc), so, no, nobody has ever created such an app.

You can build phone gap apps via phonegap's build service. I do this regularly. You tell it to pull from github and it builds for every platform.

Whoops. That's my bad. Not sure what I why I typed that to begin with.

So do you think it would be a good idea to use Trigger if: a) I needed an end result fast, and b) I am not creating a game?

I have not done practical iOS development before so I don't know what I will be missing or what I will need if I go with Trigger instead of a native iOS application.

We'll add more case studies and user comments to our homepage, but in the meantime we've blogged about some examples:

Hojoki (my favorite): http://trigger.io/cross-platform-application-development-blo...

Wine Box: http://trigger.io/cross-platform-application-development-blo...

Need An Accountant: http://trigger.io/cross-platform-application-development-blo...

jh3 - shoot me an email. I can help answer some of your questions. kris (dot) krause (at) gmail

Why don't you answer them in this forum, where others can read?

EDIT: I speculate that he wants to answer privately, because he will say something negative about competitors. I think that's a bad practice - if you are willing to email a user a statement, you should be willing to make it in public.

For the record, he did not say anything bad about competitors. He just made it known that he really likes Trigger, thinks it's good unless creating something complex like a game, and offered me help if needed.

The most big difference with Phonegap is that Trigger.io doesn't allow native plugins.

But it's easy to switch between Phonegap and Trigger.io so you can try them both.

We actually do support native plugins - alpha live now, beta coming soon: http://docs.trigger.io/en/v1.4/modules/native/index.html

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