Upgrading your PhoneGap Android Application to 1.0.0

With the release of PhoneGap 1.0.0 some folks may run into some problems upgrading their existing applications to the latest version.  If you are not using "droidgap create" to generate a brand new Eclipse project using PhoneGap 1.0.0 here are a few things you should be aware of:

1. Obviously you'll need to modify the script tag that references phonegap-{ver}.js to be phonegap-1.0.0.js.
2. Secondly you'll need to remove the current phonegap-{ver}.jar from the build path and add phonegap-1.0.0.jar to the build path. 
3. If you run your app and it gets the Force Close dialog then you probably didn't copy plugins.xml into the res/xml directory in your application. If the xml directory doesn't exist create it!
4. If you are unable to open a second html page in your app then you're missing the following tag which should be placed in the application tag of your apps AndroidManifest.xml:
   
   <activity android:name="com.phonegap.DroidGap" android:label="@string/app_name" android:configChanges="orientation|keyboardHidden">
   <intent-filter>
   </intent-filter>
   </activity>
   
   Please note after you add this activity you should have two activities under your applications tag. The above activity should not replace the one currently in your application tag.
   
5. If you see and error about PluginManager.addService() not existing then you are using old style plugins. Go into the Plugins .js file and comment out of straight up delete the PluginManager.addService() line from the PhoneGap.addContructor() method.  Then you should add a plugin tag to the plugins tag in your plugins.xml.
   
   For instance if you are using the TTS plugin you'd add:
   
   <plugin name="TTS" value="com.phonegap.plugins.speech.TTS"/>

This may not be an exhaustive list of issues you may run into on an upgrade but it is all I can think of right now.  If you find something else comment on this post and I'll update it.

My Upcoming Conferences

Apparently people like this PhoneGap thing. So much so I'll be talking about it at three conferences this year.

• OSCON July 27, 2011 - Building Native Mobile Applications with PhoneGap
• InterLab, US Dept. Of Energy October 2011 - Workshop on Building Cross Platform Mobile Apps with PhoneGap
• AnDevCon II November 2011 - Extending Your PhoneGap Application with Plug-ins

If you are going to be at any of these conferences and would like to talk more about PhoneGap in depth just let me know and we'll arrange sometime to chat.

Sandman Commission by Jay Odjick

So this arrived in the mail today:

and you'll have to trust me when I say that it looks even better in person. The sketch was done by local Ottawa artist Jay Odjick. I met Jay at one of the presentations at this years Ottawa Writers Festival when we both showed up to see JM DeMatteis and Mike Carey.

Jay is a talented artist who will be releasing his own original graphic novel in a few weeks called Kagagi: The Raven. You can check out this eight page preview on line. If you decide this is something you'd be interested in take the order code, STK436038, to any comic shop and they will be able to get it for you.