Author: Phil

Born in Salzburg, Philipp studied Telecommunications Engineering at the University of Applied Science in Salzburg and received his M.Sc. in Computer System Engineering from University of Halmstad, Sweden. Prior to joining Wikitude, Philipp worked at VeriSign Inc. in Boston, USA and T‑Mobile Austria as Product and Innovation Manager.

Categories
Dev to Dev

Moving from PhoneGap to the Cordova Plugin

Hi folks,

Careful followers of Wikitude will have noticed in the past few days, we’ve moved away from PhoneGap and are now offering a Cordova plugin. As many of you know, Apache Cordova is the open-source spin-off of PhoneGap (after the acquisition by Adobe). Fear not, we haven’t given up on PhoneGap, but have renamed the Wikitude PhoneGap Plugin to the Wikitude Cordova Plugin.

PhoneGap vs. Cordova

In the past, the difference between Cordova and PhoneGap has raised more than a few questions and caused a bit of unintentional confusion, especially as both projects walked hand-in-hand in the beginning. Cordova was PhoneGap and PhoneGap was Cordova. Many people tried to compare Cordova to being the engine powering PhoneGap, very similar to Webkit acts as the engine for Safari or other browsers. Personally, I thought that PhoneGap and Cordova were too close, that a good differentiation was possible.

That all changed when PhoneGap introduced PhoneGap Build – the first service offering by the PhoneGap team, allowing to build PhoneGap apps in the cloud. Here, it became readily apparent that PhoneGap was moving towards providing a development framework and additional services based on Cordova.

Being under the Apache umbrella, Cordova is an open-source project to the core. What this means is that every other company can take the Cordova base and start building their own development framework on top of it. And companies did. There’s currently a great selection of development frameworks based on Cordova that all have their specialities and dedicated developer groups.

Look at Intel, who integrated Cordova in their Intel XDK framework, SAP making their SAP Mobile Platform compatible with Cordova or Telerik enabling their AppBuild product with Cordova. And there are are many, many more out there. This is great for providers of PhoneGap Cordova Plugins as this means that all of those frameworks can use and work with your existing plugin.

Screen Shot 2015-05-05 at 14.22.48

For us, it was time to honor this industry shift and reflect it by renaming our plugin to the Wikitude Cordova Plugin. Having a look at the data, Google Trends also thinks that it’s a good idea (see above). You can now find the renamed repositories for the Wikitude Cordova plugin on Github under wikitude-cordova-plugin and wikitude-cordova-plugin-samples.

While the name has changed, the quality you’ve come to know and expect from Wikitude will stay the same.

Head on over to the Download section to give our Cordova Plugin a spin, and let us know what you think in the comments below!

Cheers!

Phil – Wikitude Product Manager

PS: A word on PhoneGap Build – although Adobe relaxed their policy on 3rd party plugins for Build, we’re unable to provide you with direct integration, as our plugin is over the file size limit Adobe has imposed. Once Adobe ups the files size, we’re ready to go.

Categories
SDK releases

Wikitude SDK Maintenance Release 4.1.1

The Wikitude SDK version 4.1.1 is now available for download. This stable release is purely a maintenance and stability update, with no new added features. The update is available for Android and iOS platform and can be downloaded from www.wikitude.com/download

We highly recommend developers using 4.1.0 install this update to ensure optimal results. If you’re using an older version, please see the migration guides for Android, and/or iOS in our documentation “how to upgrade to 4.1.x”.

The update also includes a revamped iOS setup guide, a guide on how to include the Wikitude SDK in Android Studio and a setup guide for using The Wikitude Cordova plugin with Intel XDK.

A big thanks to all that have reported outstanding issues and feedback.

Changelog for the Wikitude SDK 4.1.1

Fixes
- Windows version of 3D Encoder
- `onError` handler now has more details about what failed
- Loading of ClientTracker works as expected when no `onLoaded` trigger is set
- openInBrowser can load .html files from external storage (Android only)
- an issue with inverted axis when using image recognition in combination with the front camera (iOS only)
Updated
- Documentation clarifications and fixes
- Terms of Service