@Jasmine as far as Brian’s question about Siri, that depends on if Apple allows third party developers to create the plugin for it. Most of PhoneGap’s device specific plugins are developed by third parties.
@Ophelie when you are working through your concepts for a mobile application, think about flow, think about the screens you will be presenting, think about how many taps, clicks, swipes people have to do just to get anything, you only have to look at the last 2 years of mobile banking apps to see that mistakes were made, and only now are we starting to see some well thought out designs. The speed of your application has to have a direct relationship to how it is designed, don’t bloat your code, don’t bloat your database, think things through, you don’t have the power of a desktop or the flexibility of a web server behind you, they are mobile devices, yes, powerful, but still a different beast to what we use for other tasks. Another good example here, if you want your user to add items to a grid, try presenting many items first and letting them swipe to delete, it is faster than adding… think differently.
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I’m curious what the best kind of apps are to make using PhoneGap and Xamarin - I mean, can you build a decent game?
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@Jasmine To be honest if you want to create awesome cross platform games you need to look at Unity 3D www.unity3d.com
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@RockyH Angular fails? non that I have come across. Its the same with lots of mobile frameworks, you can mix and match with PhoneGap, there is a ton of support out there and some classy libraries. But beware, there are some that you wouldn’t include too. Due diligence is important just the same as desktop dev.
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BTW I never introduced myself. I’m a Technical Evangelist with Microsoft Australia. I focus on Azure and Cross Platform apps and services. (book coming out soon)
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thanks for helping me out.We received a couple of questions about debugging and testing for PhoneGap, Xamarin and DevExtreme, so I’m wondering what the best way to go about this is.
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I just did a quick search and found this re TypeScript
type checking at compile time.
Considering I like XHTML and feel HTML5 is a bit wrong for allowing “sloppiness” I know I’ll take to it easily.
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Hi @RockyH - we evaluated Azure mobile backend services and although I love some of the stuff that Azure has, we found that Parse.com was a bit simpler to use.
What are your thoughts on the benefits / risks of the Azure vs Parse.com (which is owned by Facebook)?
@jasmine Use Visual Studio. 
It can plug into all of those for debugging. PhoneGap projects are essentially Cordova project in Visual Studio. The integration between Xamarin and Visual Studio is very good. You can even use Visual Studio to remotely debug apps running on a physical iPhone.
@Jasmine Xamarin debugging (especially if using Xamarin Studio) is straight forward, it has great integration with the running app on the device or simulator, for PhoneGap, it depends on the IDE you are using, I prefer to use Visual Studio and run the DevExtreme simulator which shows me the native view in my web browser, of course then I can use the debugging tools of VS. If you prefer other browsers (what? there are other browsers @RockyH) then you can use the plethora of dev tools to debug the JS within the browser. Cool thing with PhoneGap, you can build apps using NotePad 
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There’s XHTML5 too. 
@jpdp While I’m not an expert on parse.com there have been reports similar to yours. It is focused on doing quick mobile apps with a back-end DB and push notifications. It handles that scenario well… If that’s all you want to do, then it’s a good choice. If however, you grow your app to millions of users and massive IoT, as I understand it Parse.Com has some scale issues. Azure App Services (which includes websites, mobile services etc) do everything Parse.com can, and more, with internet scale capacity.
It’s like comparing VB and C++. VB is easier to use, but it doesn’t offer the power and flexibility that C++ does.
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For anyone wanting to see Xamarin.Forms, DevExpress Grid and Azure Mobile Services in use, you can always join me tomorrow for a live presentation dxpr.es/19KI2dp
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I am learning so much 
I can hardly keep up.
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LOL - I am not sure that the Facebook fanboys would like to be known as VB!
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@RockyH @Jpdp my choice was Azure, yes, slightly more to learn up front, but so much available resource after you get started, and no I’m not just saying that, I looked at a number of service provides, but found MS to be solid around (quality, service, cost, growth)
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Looks to me that debugging is integral
