When building Cordova apps for iOS you need to be prepared to deal with external links that you might want to open outside of the WebView control. By default any 'external' links routed to an href target or window.open() call are still opened in the same WebView rather than externally in Safari or whatever the default browser is. This often is a problem since there's no way to navigate back to your initial content. In this post I describe the problem and how to use a plug-in to work around what should be native behavior in any WebView control.

Looks like my "Taming Mobile Apps with Cordova and Visual Studio" article went live recently. If you want to find out how to use the new and pretty awesome Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova for building Web based, hybrid Mobile apps, this article is a great starting point. The article gives an overview of Cordova and then walks through examples with special focus on building iOS apps.

Apache Cordova is a hybrid mobile toolset to build Mobile applications using Web Technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. Microsoft recently released a preview of its toolset for building Cordova applications with Visual Studio. In this article Rick takes a look at the Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova for building, debugging and running iOS mobile applications from Windows by way of an example that takes an existing mobile Web AlbumViewer app and porting it to Cordova.

Ran into a nasty problem with an Android app install today and was unable to get the app to install on the device for debugging. Got an INSTALL_FAILED_VERSION_DOWNGRADE after a bunch of false starts it turns out this problem had an easy solution for me.