Wednesday, May 23, 2012

mobile webkit alert dialog breaks touch event cycle

The mobile webkits on Android and iOS both contain a bug. If you make a call to alert during a touchend event, the browser ends up in a weird state where it refires the original touch start event as soon as you touch anywhere on the display.

This has led to a bug report on mgwt: http://code.google.com/p/mgwt/issues/detail?id=135
This has absolute no effect on desktop browsers and can only be observed on mobile webkits.

From now on mgwt fixes this in all aggregated events (like Tap, LongTap, etc.) with deferred binding without any runtime penalties for unaffected browsers. Internally we are scheduling a command to be executed so that the entry of your execution is no longer the touchend event.

Of course we need to file a bug with the webkit open source project to get this fixed in the long run.


Saturday, May 5, 2012

Talk about mgwt & gwt-phonegap at the dutch GTUG

Earlier this week I was invited to talk about mobile development with google technologies at the dutch google technology user group.

I had a very nice evening and talked to a lot of nice fellow developers. Especially I want to thank Rokesh Jankie and Qualogy for hosting the event. We also recorded a video of my talk and posted it on youtube:



 This is around 90 minutes talk about the basic concepts of phonegap, gwt, gwt-phonegap & mgwt. If you are thinking of building mobile apps with HTML5 there is a lot of interesting content.
So enjoy watching.

Thursday, May 3, 2012

gwt phonegap 1.7 released

Today phonegap 1.7 got released, which contains some important fixes for all GWT Apps.
I have been working very hard behind the scenes to get those issues fixed
The phonegap team was very supportive and helpful and together we were able to get everything worked out.
With this release GWT and Phonegap will play very nicely together.

A new version is now available on google code or from maven central:
<dependency>
      <groupId>com.googlecode.gwtphonegap</groupId>
      <artifactId>gwtphonegap</artifactId>
      <version>1.7.0.0</version>
</dependency>