Add social sharing icons to your app

I wanted to be able to share selected content in my app to several social media places, and not merely by copy/paste to an email client. Now my app can share contents of a <textarea> field to Facebook, Google+, Google Drive, Dropbox, a memo app, email, and so on. It was easier to do than I thought. Here is how I did it for Android.

This assumes you already have a Cordova project built and Android platform added. (Steps will be slightly different for iOS. I’ll add those steps to this page when I’m ready.)

Resource:
https://github.com/EddyVerbruggen/SocialSharing-PhoneGap-Plugin

My current environment:
Mac OS X El Capitan 10.11.6
cordova -v: 6.3.1
cordova platform ?: android 5.1.1

Using Android Studio with Cordova projects

This article assumes you already have a Cordova project ready to use. So you will use CLI to build the project first as you normally would, including adding an Android platform to the project and running cordova build android. You’ll still need to use the steps outlined in my article to build Cordova apps, including steps for installing plugins, icons, and screens: https://iphonedevlog.wordpress.com/2014/06/20/using-cordova-3-5-cli-on-mac-os-x-mavericks-to-build-android-apps/

You’ll need the dependencies set up if you’ve never made a Cordova project before. See: https://iphonedevlog.wordpress.com/2014/10/30/setting-up-your-developmemt-environment-for-cordovaphonegap-android-projects/

Resources:
https://cordova.apache.org/docs/en/latest/guide/platforms/android/
https://developer.android.com/studio/intro/index.html
https://developer.android.com/studio/install.html 

Another Grunt task: installing Imagemin

I am continuing to add to my grunt task runner process that I started in this post, https://iphonedevlog.wordpress.com/2016/10/31/how-to-use-grunt-to-automate-repetitive-tasks/ (At a minimum, you need to do steps 1-6 on that page.)

In this new article, I’ll add one more processors that I had already listed in the previous article:

d. npm install grunt-contrib-imagemin –save-dev (minimize images to make them faster loading)

I am adding it to the Gruntfile.js file already created in that article. So if you are doing grunt for the first time, you should read that page first — it is an introductory guide for the first-time user.