PhoneGap online app builder

I just tried the new Phonegap online service, and it’s pretty impressive.  I already had a mobile html website handy, so all I had to do was upload it as a zip file.  Within minutes, I was running it on my Android phone.  It had also built iPhone, Android, WebOS, and Symbian apps.  It would have completed one for Blackberry too but it found some compatibility errors which it kindly pointed out to me.

Here are screenshots:

HP gives up on Palm WebOS

It’s official, HP is dropping WebOS. It was a beautiful OS while it lasted, in many aspects it rivaled the iPhone.

Financially speaking, Elevation Partners may have made the right decision selling to HP, but for consumers, they clearly sold to the wrong partner.  If Google had picked up WebOS, maybe Android would have a nicer look to it.

I still remember a meeting with the design team at Palm right before they launched WebOS.  It was a spectacular team, picked from all the best companies in Silicon Valley.  Sharp, confident people who knew how to build a mobile interface that really worked for people.  It felt like a product from the early days of Palm, revolutionary user experience.

PhoneGap

PhoneGap is an open source development framework for building cross-platform mobile apps. Developers can build their apps in HTML and JavaScript. Many underlying functions of the handset are exposed through the PhoneGap web-development interface. For example, PhoneGap makes it possible to access the GPS capabilities on iPhone/iPod touch, iPad, Google Android, Palm, Symbian and Blackberry.

PhoneGap was created by developers Brock and Rob from Nitobi Software in Vancouver in September of 2008, but it’s run as an open source project under the MIT and BSD licenses and has a large base of code contributors. PhoneGap is very compatible with Sencha Touch.

Pros:
Build a native app using web technologies.
It won’t cost you anything, unless you want training or consulting.

Cons:
You will need to submit your own apps through the different app stores.
The UI isn’t necessarily pretty, though tools like Sencha Touch can help.

PhoneGap technical resources:
http://wiki.phonegap.com/w/page/16494772/FrontPage
PhoneGap source code at GitHub
PhoneGap Google Group
Training calendar

PhoneGap has two basic parts:

A native library that makes web views available and native APIs accessible through Javascript calls.

A set of Javascript files that wrap up native APIs includes:
device identification
network access
geolocation
accelerometer
orientation
magnetometer
camera and images
contacts
file access

Since PhoneGap apps are native, they can function without access to a server if they use local storage.

PhoneGap Build is currently in beta and will let a developer run their HTML5 app through PhoneGap to create an application binary which they can then submit to the App Stores.
A Dev browser is also in development to allow testing of PhoneGap apps within mobile browsers.