You may have seen Burke Holland’s “Building A PhoneGap App in 36 Seconds Using Nothing But a Browser” article on Medium this morning. Although most people probably viewed the post as an interesting—and surprisingly fast—way of building an app, I saw the article as a direct challenge.

You see, although I work with AppBuilder in the browser from time to time, I prefer the AppBuilder CLI. And with the CLI, I can put Burke’s 36 second time to shame. Below I build a PhoneGap app, performing the same steps Burke did, in TEN seconds:

Full Disclosure

• This was done using the Telerik AppBuilder CLI.
• I did NOT speed up the screen capture.
• I DID practice this a few times.
• I DID have to lookup the syntax for the sed command, because it makes no sense.
• I DID use the AppBuilder Companion app, which I had pre-installed on my iPhone.
• I DID rely on the Bash history for speed, which I deem fair, because that’s a thing CLIs do.

With the AppBuilder CLI installed (npm install -g appbuilder), and with the AppBuilder iOS app installed, you can run this yourself with the following four commands:

$ appbuilder create hybrid gif --template=Blank
$ cd gif
$ sed -i '' 's/Apache Cordova/gif/g' index.html
$ appbuilder livesync ios --companion

What’s really cool is that as of the last AppBuilder release, you can now share your code across the AppBuilder clients. That means, I can collborate on Burke’s project from the CLI, and he can collaborate on mine from the browser—which I think is pretty cool.