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I want to make my first Phonegap App. It will be one container, that at the end will call an API and display results. Nothing complex.

But because I have read about the problems, what phonegap has especially in the iOS world of not so smooth scrolling etc. I would like if you can share some experience to me so I can avoid dome big mistakes from the begining.

Firstable: do you use jQuery mobile or Zepto? I have read that Zepto is very fast and there is no overhead like on jQuery. What kind of library do you use for Design?

I have my own design, but in PSD file actually. Should I try to make everything by my own, or should I use some frameworks like jQTouch? If I use jQTouch, can I design the elements in the way my PSD design is looking? What else libraries are out there, where I can make my own design with it?

The design is one thins, where I have some troubles. Should I slize it and make from it HTML5 with CSS3, but does it run on Phonegap? I want as well use some template engine like http://mustache.github.com/ so the template can be load faster. Some experience here?

I saw that Wikipedia has used many of the features I have posted here and I think maybe they are good enough to create an app with good performance.

What is your experience?

Shadow The GPT Wizard
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Mutatos
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2 Answers2

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bad scrolling on iOS devices. Yes, but we have more problems with Android. it depends on how full your DOM tree will be. A heavy page will always make troubles, espacially on old phones.

jQuery or Zepto: barely a difference.

hands off jQuery Mobile! jQTouch: maybe. Be aware that on low end devices phonegap app runs just slow, no matter how optimized they are. Some older phones have terrible javascript performance, if possible outsource business logic to a server and let the device only display data. I recommend do most of the design on your own. keep the DOM tree small.

summary: don´t expect too much of phonegap, it will be never as good as a native app.

最白目
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  • Hey Dan: thanks for the answer. Yes I know, that native app is the best one .. but not in my case. It depends on budget and because I would like to run some A/B tests I need to have the app on my hands to make frequently updates. – Mutatos Nov 14 '12 at 11:33
  • What do you mean with own design without frmework? How can I make for example the page changes like slide to the left or rigth, or become the new page, when I click on a link from the bottom slided. You know this cool effects what the most apps have? – Mutatos Nov 14 '12 at 11:34
  • I tried to implement slide animations with jQuery UI. The performance was only so so. Again here: the more DOM objects the page had the slower the slide animation worked. Check it out http://jqueryui.com/effect/ – 最白目 Nov 14 '12 at 11:44
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I use jQuery mobile with my own custom framework ( http://github.com/tqc/ChondricJS ) on top to provide most of the app structure.

You can get decent performance with this setup, particularly with iOS 5+, but there are a lot of small things you can do wrong that will cause problems. Background images and touch scrolling in particular are very sensitive to small differences in usage.

PhoneGap will give you a shared cross platform codebase and let you take advantage of your HTML and JavaScript skills, but don't expect everything to feel perfect out of the box - there are still differences between platforms, so you definitely need to debug natively and understand the various quirks of mobile safari to produce a polished app.

Tom Clarkson
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