Book Image

PhoneGap 3 Beginner's Guide

By : Giorgio Natili
Book Image

PhoneGap 3 Beginner's Guide

By: Giorgio Natili

Overview of this book

<p>You don’t have to know complex languages like Objective C to compete in the ever-growing mobile market place. The PhoneGap framework lets you use your web development skills to build HTML and JavaScript-based mobile applications with native wrappers that run on all the major mobile platforms, including Android, iOS, and Windows Phone 8.</p> <p>"PhoneGap 3 Beginner's Guide" will help you break into the world of mobile application development. You will learn how to set up and configure your mobile development environment, implement the most common features of modern mobile apps, and build rich, native-style applications. The examples in this book deal with real use case scenarios, which will help you develop your own apps, and then publish them on the most popular app stores.</p> <p>Dive deep into PhoneGap and refine your skills by learning how to build the main features of a real world app.</p> <p>"PhoneGap 3 Beginner's Guide" will guide you through the building blocks of a mobile application that lets users plan a trip and share their trip information. With the help of this app, you will learn how to work with key PhoneGap tools and APIs, extend the framework’s functionality with plug-ins, and integrate device features such as the camera, contacts, storage, and more. By the time you’re finished, you will have a solid understanding of the common challenges mobile app developers face, and you will know how to solve them.</p>
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
PhoneGap 3 Beginner's Guide
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Mobile-centric HTML/CSS/JavaScript


When using PhoneGap, you create hybrid apps based upon standards. The app is rendered to the user through a WebView, which means it is a browser instance wrapped into the app itself.

For this reason, it's important to know how to use mobile-specific HTML tags, CSS properties, and JavaScript methods, properties, and events.

The viewport meta tag

The viewport meta tag was introduced by Apple with iOS 1.0 and is largely supported in all the major mobile browsers. When a web page doesn't fit the size of the browser, the default behavior of a mobile browser is to scale it. The viewport meta tag is what you need in order to have control over this behavior.

A viewport meta tag looks like the following code snippet:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, height=device-height, initial-scale=1, minimum-scale=1, maximum-scale=1.5, user-scalable=1">

What you are actually saying to the browser is that the default width and height of the content are the...