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

Using hardware-accelerated transitions


Much has been said about the use of GPU (graphics processing unit) hardware acceleration in smartphone and tablet web browsers. The general scheme is to offload tasks that would otherwise be calculated by the main CPU to the GPU in your computer's graphics adapter. (For a very detailed article to better understand hardware-accelerated transitions, go to http://www.sencha.com/blog/understanding-hardware-acceleration-on-mobile-browsers.)

GPU can accelerate:

  • The general layout compositing

  • All the CSS transitions

  • The CSS 3D transformations

  • All the canvas drawing operations

You can create smooth animations with the new CSS transitions pretty easily defining them in your stylesheets or you can rely on external libraries.

CSS transitions are supported in the latest versions of Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. They're supported in IE 10 and onwards. If CSS animations aren't supported in a given browser, then the properties will be applied instantly, gracefully degrading...