Apache Cordova

My son is lacking a bit in the language department. To help him get better I decided to implement an app which randomized a set of pictures into a grid of 4 cells. The app tells out loud the name of the object/thing in one of the pictures which he has to pick.

I decided that I wanted to tryout Apache Cordova (formerly PhoneGap) and build it as an hybrid-app. Apache Cordova can be installed directly from Node’s package manager ‘NPM’:

npm install -g cordova

To create an app, call

cordova create AppName

which will scaffold a Cordova HTML5 app in the folder AppName.

cordova run browser

will build and start the cordova application in a browser.

cordova run android

will build and start the cordova application in an Android environment. The latter requires the android SDK and an attached device or emulator.

One issues I found with Cordova 6.x was that I was unable to create a proper Android build. Assets was not correctly compiled. I reverted to Cordova 5.x which worked perfectly. My guess is that this will be fixed in the next version.