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

Compass


The PhoneGap Compass API allows you to obtain the direction that the device is pointing to. The compass is a sensor that detects the direction or heading in which the device is pointed and returns the heading of the device in degrees using values from 0 to 359.99. The Compass API works similarly to the Accelerometer API; in fact you can read the current device heading or you can define a watcher in order to continuously read the heading value.

The Compass API is available on the compass property of the navigator object and exposes the following functions:

  • compass.getCurrentHeading, reads the current compass heading through a handler.

  • compass.watchHeading, reads the compass heading at a specific time interval through a handler and returns a reference to it.

  • compass.clearWatch, stops a previously defined time interval reading handler.

The getCurrentHeading and whatchHeading functions accept very similar arguments; the only difference is the last argument of the whatchHeading function...