Monday, November 11, 2013

Really glad to see all that PhoneGap effort paying off

If this comes off as a bit self-congratulatory then so be it. Sometimes my trumpet needs blowing and there isn't a big queue of people lining up to do it for me.

Earlier this year Microsoft ran a competition (challenge) to bring existing apps built with PhoneGap (Apache Cordova) to Windows Phone.
Recently, Microsoft highlighted and interviewed the winning apps again.

I'm especially pleased to see this.
Back in the summer of 2010 (yes, so long ago) I spent some time building what became the Windows Phone version of PhoneGap and then Cordova.

Honest. Look, here's a screenshot of the network graph from GitHub.


This was done at a time when there were questions about the ownership of the apps I built in my own time, with respect to my then employer.

Rather than spend my time building apps I might have to argue for ownership of I spent my time on other things. I spent a lot of time answering Windows Phone related questions on Stack Overflow and working on open source projects like the WP7 verison of PhoneGap.
I was familiar with PhoneGap from having used it to build iPhone apps in 2009 and saw that it would be beneficial to Windows Phone as a platform if it was easy for existing PhoneGap apps  to be repackaged and retargeted at WP. As there wasn't anyone else working on it at the time I decided to step up.
Unfortunately the performance of hybrid apps on Windows Phone 7 was a long way off that of native apps which greatly affected it's adoption. Fortunately things greatly improved with Windows Phone 8 and more apps are now being built and ported over from other platforms.
While I was only involved at the beginning when it came to the amalgamation of Windows Phone and PhoneGap/Cordova I still like to think I played a part and remember fondly the work I did at the time.

I look forward to seeing more great apps being built with PhoneGap in the future. :)


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