How I built my first mobile app with Trigger.io

I'm evaluating Trigger.io currently for a new project. I've used phonegap on a couple large projects before, as well. For me, Trigger's best value proposition isn't the ease of development. For the average hacker the few extra steps you need to take to use Phonegap/Cordova aren't overly complicated and in the end you have a better idea of how everything fits together. If Trigger.io's main selling point is going to be "easier to use than phonegap" I think they may fall flat.

Where real value can be provided, however, is in providing turn-key modules that allow developers to drop in native controls to supplement their web applications. The biggest issue with hybrid mobile application development today is embedded webview performance, especially on older devices. Using a framework like Sencha works wonderfully for newer devices (it feels positively native on my iPhone 4s), but because they have to rely on javascript to fix elements and scroll certain sections on older devices, it ends up delivering a sub-par experience for those users (on older androids the scrolling performance is atrocious).

Trigger.io is currently offering API calls that allow you to drop in a tab bar and a navigation bar which are native components. These are the two elements in a mobile app that are most likely to require fixed positioning, so this frees the webview up to simply serve a normal web page with natural, native scrolling on all devices. This is essentially what Facebook is doing with their current app - fixed native navigation elements and scrolling UIWebViews. However, as we all know, Facebook's results have been less than satisfactory. They admit that this hybrid approach helped their developers iterate faster and be more productive, but instead of sticking with that strategy and figuring out clever ways to make it perform better, they've capitulated and are going full native.

If Trigger.io was able to solve that problem and make a hybrid HTML5/native app perform as well as any other native app, they would really have something there. My advice would be to figure out how to get UIWebViews to load faster and cache better, how to allow customization of native UI elements so that designers can deliver a unique, beautiful interface that scales across multiple platforms, and continue to provide best-in-class hooks into the native functionality on the leading platforms, such as dead-simple push notification integration. Focus less on competing with phonegap and more on solving the hybrid app problem.

What is the deal with all these "I made an app using trigger.io" blog posts that seem to have been paid for by trigger.io? I don't think I've seen a mention of trigger.io yet that doesn't grossly misrepresent phonegap as being some difficult, arcane, "only greybeards can use it" monstrosity.

I decided to go with Trigger.io to achieve my goal, as I wanted to spare myself endless hours spent on configuring environment (as opposed to PhoneGap/Appcelerator)

Huh? Have you tried phonegap? How does "click next on a couple of installers and extract a single zip file" take hours of configuration?

Trigger.io provides you with a pleasant environment, where you don’t have to touch command line at all! It works as an app within your browser, from localhost. I do understand that a lot of folks may prefer “hacker-style” black terminal over Trigger’s clean and minimalistic web app, but for me clicking a button that i can see instead of typing a command is a much better experience, especially at the beginning.

I can't figure out what on earth he is trying to compare it to here. What html/js mobile app framework involves typing commands in "hacker style black terminals"? With phonegap you just click "run as android application" (or whatever you want to run it as).

This is how hard it actually is to setup phonegap: http://docs.phonegap.com/en/1.8.1/guide_getting-started_android_index.md.html#Getting%20Started%20with%20Android

Thanks for the write-up and your recommendation Peter :D

We're working on supporting more and more native features, such as the ones you describe. And you'll see from our blog that we're getting features out reasonably fast at the moment.

You can send a text message using our SMS module right now though:

http://docs.trigger.io/en/v1.3/modules/sms.html

Looks like the author has partially succumbed to Hello World Fallacy. His first extremely simple experiment (I'm reluctant to call it 'app') was successful and he is extrapolating this in slightly too optimistic direction.