Trigger.io Blog

Irony: I'm a new Ruby developer spending a lot of time in the Rubysphere and have never heard of your company before.

But I can tell you how I've heard of most products, services and companies that have turned me into a user or potential user.

1. Blog posts celebrating the way your product makes 'x' way easier and/or faster and/or better than the way I'm used to. See http://trigger.io/cross-platform-application-development-blog/

2. Blog posts/guest blog posts/screencasts by your users showing how your product makes them awesome at doing 'x'. You could aim high (Railscasts) or target a growing niche (Spree users, etc.) - though you want to be careful not to push this too hard. The best recommendations will be totally organic, but you can nudge things by mentioning developers/apps on your own blog, etc.

3. Blog posts by partners (e.g. Sendgrid talking about their Heroku integration).

I didn't mean for all my points to be calls for blog posts, but I guess there's a lesson in there. Use your blog to SHOW what you and your users are doing and you're on the right track. I'm not even sure this is marketing - more like developer outreach. But I'm assuming the goal of your marketing is more developers using your platform.

We totally agree that when things have a solid foundation it makes sense to build on top of them. The problem we saw with Phonegap was several design decisions we disagreed with (as we described briefly in the blog post).

This left us with the option of putting up with it (and ending up with an inferior product), or writing our own bridge, and writing our own bridge made sense. Of course you are right in that writing anything new means you have to work hard to get it to as high a standard as the alternatives, which is why we work hard to test our platform - see http://trigger.io/cross-platform-application-development-blog/2012/01/26/how-forge-works-and-why-were-proud-of-it/.

It's also important to remember that the native bridge is just one part of our product, we also write the code that generates and builds the app, which we want to integrate as tightly as possible. Writing our own bridge makes this a lot easier to do well.

There are a few good options for debugging. Trigger has the Catalyst debugging tool which brings a Webkit-style debugging interface to mobile development (https://trigger.io/catalyst/). You can run apps in the simulator and on connected devices then remotely view the DOM and debug Javascript in the web interface.

Trigger can also generate web apps (http://current-docs.trigger.io/web/index.html), so when not using native phone functionality (e.g. the camera) you might like to debug with a web app and use Chrome/Firefox developer tools in your desktop browser.

With liberal use of forge.logging (http://current-docs.trigger.io/api/logging.html) these techniques should be useful! I think you'll find things have progressed since you last used cross-platform frameworks. Any questions do drop us a line on support@trigger.io.

I've been building hybrid apps (HTML/CSS/Javascript) for quite some time now. It's getting better and better, and there are quite a few resources available.

Just follow these simple steps:

- Get Apache Cordova (https://cordova.apache.org/)

- Try Ionic Framework (http://ionicframework.com/)

- Try Ratchet (http://goratchet.com/)

- jQuery Mobile, obviously (http://jquerymobile.com/)

- If you need more help, try Codiqa (https://codiqa.com/)

- Try Trigger.io (http://trigger.io)

Cordova makes it super simple to deploy to app stores, and it's awesome. I make mobile apps all the time. Though not as good as native, it certainly has been improving, especially in the recent years.

AppHub co-founder here, we realize that this is something that would seem to be prohibited by Apple, but updating JavaScript code is explicitly permitted by the iOS Developer Agreement [1]. This same technology is used by Meteor [2], Trigger.io [3], and Adobe Hydration [4], and also used by Facebook and Palantir [5] in their apps.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/programs/ios/information/iOS_Program_Information_4_3_15.pdf

[2] http://info.meteor.com/blog/apple-hot-code-push-mobile

[3] https://trigger.io/

[4] http://docs.build.phonegap.com/en_US/tools_hydration.md.html

[5] https://medium.com/@clayallsopp/a-dynamic-crazy-native-mobile-future-powered-by-javascript-70f2d56b1987

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-blog/2012/08/09/app-showcase-hojoki-in-action/

Wine Box: http://trigger.io/cross-platform-application-development-blog/2012/05/15/how-to-build-a-location-based-hybrid-mobile-app-with-reverse-geocoding/

Need An Accountant: http://trigger.io/cross-platform-application-development-blog/2012/05/08/using-geolocation-and-gmaps-with-trigger-io-appnovation-gets-first-time-app-store-approval/