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Today we’re celebrating the launch of PhoneGap 1.0 at PhoneGap Day in Portland! Kudos to the PhoneGap community who has so generously contributed time and expertise to the project. We’ll be toasting you and all your efforts today!

PhoneGap 1.0 Released Today at First-Ever PhoneGap Day in Portland
Popular Open Source Mobile Development Framework Gets Upgrades Including More Access to Native Device APIs and Debugging Tools

Nitobi Inc., the creators of the popular PhoneGap mobile app development framework, releases PhoneGap 1.0 today at the first-ever PhoneGap Day in Portland, Oregon.

PhoneGap, an HTML5 platform, allows developers to use foundation web technology (HTML, CSS and JavaScript) to create native mobile applications. Using PhoneGap, developers can write their app once and deploy it to six major mobile platforms and app stores, including iOS, Android, BlackBerry, webOS, Bada and Symbian. PhoneGap has been widely recognized as a game-changer for mobile app development. The open source code is downloaded approximately 40,000 times every month, more than 600,000 times in total.

Today’s major release puts the focus on accessing native device APIs, which is new ground for the web. Other improvements include:

* Overall API stability and “pluggable” architecture
* W3C DAP API compatibility
* Contacts API
* Remove debugging tools

Today’s release also includes a new unifying bridge interface that makes adding platforms and platform extensions easy. Plus, developers will be pleased to see that the plugin development process has been simplified.

“Most of these new enhancements come from our community,” said Brian LeRoux, Senior Software Engineer at Nitobi and PhoneGap evangelist. “For instance, PhoneGap developers were calling for a consistent way to make plugins that would run on all major smartphone platforms and this release does that.”

“The community built up around PhoneGap is its greatest asset,” says Nitobi CEO Andre Charland. “The PhoneGap community identifies common pain points and works together to overcome them.” Contributors include Nitobi, hundreds of individual developers and a team of senior software engineers at IBM whose commitment and contributions to PhoneGap development has been a major benefit to the community.

IBM isn’t the only Fortune 500 to show interest in PhoneGap. Earlier this year, Adobe integrated PhoneGap into Dreamweaver so that developers can package apps with PhoneGap and launch iOS and Android emulators directly from within Dreamweaver. Other companies to adopt PhoneGap and its cross-platform philosophy include IBM, Alcatel-Lucent, Sabre, Cisco, Logitech and Time Warner.

About Nitobi Inc.
Nitobi is the creator of PhoneGap (http://www.phonegap.com) an open source development tool for building fast, easy, cross-platform mobile apps with HTML and JavaScript that take advantage of core features of Apple iOS, Google Android, HP webOS, Nokia Symbian, Samsung Bada and BlackBerry SDKs. The open source code has been downloaded more than 600,000 times and thousands of apps built using PhoneGap are available in mobile app stores and directories.

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