Blogs

Brian’s going to be talking to web devs and Ajax hackers at JSConf in Washington DC April 24th and 25th about:

PhoneGap makes building iPhone and Android applications a snap with regular HTML, CSS and JavaScript. XUI is a nifty javascript microframework designed for building mobile web applications. Avoid the heresy of Objective-C or Java and return to the sanity of the open web. In this talk Brian will guide you through the creation of a mobile web app that is app store ready and talk a little about the future platforms for PhoneGap and XUI.

On Friday Darryl Taft of eWeek wrote a very nice post on PhoneGap.

“Nitobi Inc.’s PhoneGap is catching on with smartphone application developers who want to avoid the pitfalls of writing to different phone platforms. PhoneGap is a development framework that lets HTML and JavaScript developers build native mobile phone apps that take advantage of native capabilities of the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry.”

My favorite quote is from a member of the PhoneGap community and developer:

“PhoneGap has cut my iPhone development time in half, which has been good news for my clients.” Nathan Freitas

We’ve been fielding the question “What is PhoneGap?” more and more these past couple months. So we put together this short video to help explain it:)

Get the code and more at PhoneGap.com

There was a very nice post by one of InfoWorld’s open source bloggers, Savio Rodriguez, this morning about PhoneGap. It was the last paragraph calling our RIM that really caught my attention though…

“If I worked at RIM, I’d take a trip out to Vancouver to talk to the Nitobi dudes. This framework is exactly what RIM needs to counter the trend of developers targeting the iPhone/iPod as the premier environment for mobile device applications. RIM has the brand and market share to persuade developers that writing once and targeting three key mobile platforms is the best use of a mobile developer’s effort. RIM would need to adopt WebKit as the rendering engine for their browser, but that is going to happen anyway. ;-)”

No doubt Rodriguez! My thoughts exactly. Coincidentally we just got a email from someone at RIM:) We think because easy iPhone/iPod Touch development is the carrot and closs platform is the true long term value in PhoneGap every other mobile platform (Window Mobile, Nokia/Symbian, BlackBerry, Android and Palm Pre) should be bending over backwards to help us get PhoneGap running with their OS and APIs. Maybe they all appear to be laggards today for a reason? ;-) *gloves off*

The first PhoneGap sprint wrapped up this weekend. We started Friday with about 15 folks squished into the Nitobi boardroom for Pizza, a quick explanation and game plan delivered by Brock Whitten.

Here’s a quick summary of what we accomplished on the various platforms now in the PhoneGap umbrella.

iPhone
Added network detection
Notify user if no network is detected
Memory clean ups
Made default image/screen more intelligent

Android
Accelerometer
Basic camera support
Offline support
Bugs fixed

Blackberry
GPS is totally working with the W3C API (maybe some error states don’t work but we’ll get there)
Camera works
Mapping works
Phone calls work
Vibration works

*Not all the Blackberry stuff is checked in yet.

We also cleaned up wiki the wiki a bunch. The new PhoneGap site is almost ready to push live too.

What’s next? We need to get all the JavaScript APIs in sync. Check the roadmap for more info. The website will be up shortly. Stay tuned for the Translink case study too.

Nitobi sends a big thanks to the Handi mobility guys , EffectiveUI and everyone else who came out!

BlackBerry announced a new fund to encourage mobile applicationand development.

Research In Motion (RIM) (TSX: RIM; NASDAQ: RIMM), RBC (RY: TSX; RY: NYSE) and Thomson Reuters (NYSE: TRI; TSX: TRI; LSE: TRIL; NASDAQ: TRIN), today announced plans to launch the BlackBerry® Partners Fund, a US$150 million venture capital fund, to invest in mobile applications and services for the BlackBerry® platform and other mobile platforms. The Fund is to be co-managed by JLA Ventures and RBC Venture Partners.

Agnostic to both stage and balance sheet, the BlackBerry Partners Fund will not restrict the development of mobile applications and services to any single mobile platform or any specific industry segment. The Fund will be designed to advance the industry by fostering development and driving the entrepreneurial spirit to create the most innovative mobile offerings for customers.

There’s not much more than that. The have official site with a link to the press release and an email address. I sent them a message about a cool project we’re working on here but haven’t heard anything yet.

[Update] Rick from JLA (VC involved in the fund) they will support biz plans focused on any mobile platform and they are getting a lot interest, 845 msgs to date! I’m stoked Rick’s blogging about this, it just went from a weird big co blank page plus press release shutting me out to a human on the inside with a blog talking to me.