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This is a very exciting time in the industry and for our team. However, it’s also a time of great change which is often met with skepticism and possibly some fear. Let’s get to the point: PhoneGap and all the code that makes it awesome is staying free and open source. Maybe more so than ever with our contribution to the Apache Software Foundation.

I feel the team at Nitobi and the rest of the of our contributors did a great job getting PhoneGap to where it is today. We shipped 1.0 this summer and have been making great progress since, in fact we just shipped PhoneGap 1.1 last week. It’s time to step on the gas and accelerate development of the platform, both from our team (now Adobe:)) and the wider community, which is why we’re putting PhoneGap in the Apache Software Foundation.

The issue of cross-platform app development is just now hitting mainstream attention and PhoneGap will come under increasing competitive threats. We think building on an open platform is essential to ensuring the web wins, and under Apache we can collaborate with all those who share this vision. No doubt we will compete with others and now we can do so with the support of Adobe, another company firmly committed to the web and cross platform tools and solutions.

We’ve built Nitobi on a bootstrap. We’ve built other great products over the years but now we’re on to something bigger and bolder. It’s really a movement around building apps and services with web technologies that run everywhere. We now need to focus our whole team on PhoneGap, PhoneGap Build and other tooling around HTML5 and JS development. The web and technologies that support it need fostering and support in an open manner. I’m excited to work on that!

We’re also launching PhoneGap Build with the help of a team that’s been building something awesome—cloud tools and infrastructure on top of Amazon Web Services. We’re committed to pushing forward with more cloud-based tooling and services that will help developers. We announced PhoneGap Build is in open beta last week and we’re getting ready to roll out for full on prime-time commercial use soon. We’ll be adding features and fixing bugs every day as usual. We’ll be honouring all existing client projects, support and training. We may be finding other partners and solutions to help deliver those services that are vital to the eco-system. Otherwise, it’s business as usual!

The whole team is moving to Adobe and this was very important to me. Some of us will move to SF to have more influence in the Adobe mothership and some of us will stay in Vancouver to continue to grow and foster the culture around the PhoneGap project that’s made it so great. I’m going to SF which is a great opportunity but I’ll miss the Vancouver office Kegerator. It’s really still just the beginning for PhoneGap and our team. The Nitobi team is amazing and they are some of the most talented, smart, creative, loyal and funny group of people I’ve ever worked with. I’m looking forward to continuing our journey together.

At Adobe, we will be able to focus and work together more closely than ever without the constraints and distractions you have when running a small business. I’m also excited to be joining some of the smartest minds in the industry at Adobe. Their contributions to open source and the web have largely flown under the radar. Adobe has 2 contributors to the WebKit project and have played a key role in the jQuery Mobile project. Now you tell me that WebKit + jQuery + PhoneGap don’t make up the most killer trio in the mobile web and app space. If you doubt Adobe’s intentions, it’s important to consider how Adobe makes money—it’s from tools, services and solutions not shipping runtimes.

Oh ya and given that I’m moving to California…I’ll probably learn how to surf too;-)

Today we’re excited to announce that we have entered into a definitive agreement with Adobe Systems Incoporated for Nitobi, including PhoneGap and PhoneGap Build. Here’s the news:

Adobe Announces Agreement to Acquire Nitobi, Creator of PhoneGap

Open Source HTML5 Mobile App Platform Accelerates Adobe’s HTML5 and Web Standards Strategy

LOS ANGELES — Oct. 3, 2011 — At its MAX 2011 technology conference, Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq: ADBE) today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Nitobi Software, the creator of PhoneGap and PhoneGap Build. PhoneGap is a popular open source platform for easily building fast, cross-platform mobile applications with HTML5 and JavaScript. With PhoneGap, Adobe® will offer developers the choice of two powerful solutions for cross-platform development of native mobile apps, one using HTML5 and JavaScript with PhoneGap and the other using Adobe Flash® with Adobe AIR®. PhoneGap’s open source framework has been downloaded more than 600,000 times to date and thousands of applications built using PhoneGap are available in mobile app stores that span devices based on Android, iOS, BlackBerry and other operating systems.

“PhoneGap has proven to be an industry-defining app solution for HTML5 developers,” said Danny Winokur, vice president and general manager, Platform, Adobe. “PhoneGap is a fantastic solution for developing a broad range of mobile apps using the latest Web standards, and is already integrated with Dreamweaver® CS5.5. It’s a perfect complement to Adobe’s broad family of developer solutions, including Adobe AIR, and will allow us to continue to provide content publishers and developers with the best, cutting-edge solutions for creating innovative applications across platforms and devices.”

“Adobe has always been a big supporter of the open source community and at the forefront of enabling rich, Web based applications across screens,” said Andre Charland, chief executive officer, Nitobi. “We share the same philosophy about enabling extraordinary mobile and Web applications. Becoming part of the Adobe family with its industry-leading tools and technologies opens up amazing new opportunities for PhoneGap and our customers.”

“We are also excited to announce our donation of the PhoneGap code to the Apache Software Foundation,” said Dave Johnson, chief technology officer, Nitobi. “Adobe has been fully supportive of our decision, further demonstrating Adobe’s continued commitment to the developer and open source communities. The Apache Software Foundation’s model makes it possible for contributors to collaborate on open source product development and Adobe and Nitobi look forward to engaging with other community members to advance the PhoneGap technology.”

Nitobi is based in Vancouver, Canada and Nitobi’s employees are expected to join Adobe. The acquisition is subject to certain closing conditions and is expected to close by the end of October 2011. Terms were not disclosed.

Adobe today also released its third public preview of Adobe Edge, the new HTML5 motion and interaction design tool that is bringing Flash-like animation to websites and mobile apps using the latest capabilities of HTML, JavaScript and CSS. The new release contains innovative interactivity features and other additions suggested by the development community, and enables content creators to easily deliver a new level of visual richness to HTML5-only websites and mobile apps.

Adobe has also extended existing tools like Adobe Dreamweaver and Flash Professional to bring the next generation of Web standards to designers and developers who rely on those tools. Adobe today released the new CSS3 Mobile Pack for Adobe Fireworks®, which will enable designers to easily extract CSS3 from their design elements in Fireworks and quickly add them to their HTML based websites and mobile applications.

Adobe continues to work closely with the HTML5 community to make important contributions to the W3C and key open source projects like WebKit and JQuery. Adobe has co-authored with Microsoft and submitted to the W3C a proposal for CSS Regions, which enables sophisticated magazine-like layouts using Web standards. Adobe has also contributed a preliminary implementation of CSS Regions to the open source WebKit layout engine, which is already available in the latest builds of Chromium and the WebKit browser. Microsoft has made an implementation available in the latest preview release of Internet Explorer 10. In addition, Adobe today introduced a new proposal to the W3C, co-edited with other W3C members, called CSS Shaders that brings cinematic visual effects to HTML. Finally, Adobe announced that jQuery Mobile 1.0, a popular touch-optimized open source JavaScript framework to which Adobe is a leading contributor, was just made available as a Release Candidate (RC1) this week. Concurrent with this release will be a new version of ThemeRoller, which Adobe has rebuilt from the ground up to enable users to design custom jQuery user interface themes for tight integration in mobile Web projects.

About Adobe Systems Incorporated
Adobe is changing the world through digital experiences. For more information, visit www.adobe.com.

FAQ:

What does Nitobi do?
Nitobi is the creator and primary contributor to the open source PhoneGap framework, which allows developers to create device native mobile applications using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. They also operate a consulting business providing development, support, and training services for PhoneGap. You can find out more at the Nitobi and PhoneGap sites.

Why is Adobe acquiring Nitobi?
Adobe is committed to enabling efficient, expressive design and development across devices. PhoneGap is a leading solution for cross-platform mobile development using web standards, and we’re excited to support PhoneGap’s growth by committing resources to the
development of the open source project. We integrated support for PhoneGap in Dreamweaver CS5.5, and with this acquisition we will also be bringing PhoneGap’s capabilities to a much broader range of new and existing Adobe customers though a paid hosted service, PhoneGap Build, which is currently in prerelease.

This investment reinforces Adobe’s commitment to helping their customers be even more expressive, regardless of the technology and is in line with recent product releases such as Adobe Edge and Adobe Muse (code name), as well as all of the innovation with community driven projects including contributions to the jQuery mobile UI framework and Webkit for layout and typography functionality.

What underlying technology will Adobe acquire?
While the PhoneGap framework continues to be open source and is being contributed to the Apache Software Foundation, PhoneGap Build incorporates additional proprietary code allowing developers to build their apps from anywhere without installing mobile platform SDKs.

Why is Nitobi donating the PhoneGap code to Apache?
Nitobi is pursuing a contribution of the PhoneGap code to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) to ensure open stewardship of the project over the long term. As part of that process it will be renamed to a new Apache-branded name Callback. Adobe fully supports this contribution and will continue to host the PhoneGap community site with full participation from its contributors, as well as the PhoneGap Build service.

Where do I go to get support?
Customers should go through Nitobi’s existing support channels.

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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Dave Johnson will be giving a talk on HTML5 and PhoneGap the Where 2.0 Conf April 19 2011 in Santa Clara.

HTML5 promises to pave the way for easy, device-neutral mobile app development. But, until HTML5 supports sophisticated cross-platform apps, developers are stuck building native apps for various mobile devices. Or are they?

In this session you’ll learn how combining HTML5 with the open source PhoneGap (www.phonegap.com) framework bridges the gap between what’s possible with HTML5 today and the engaging mobile apps developers want to build. See how HTML5 and PhoneGap work together and learn how to expose device features outside of the existing HTML5 spec, such as camera.

By learning to combine PhoneGap with HTML5, developers no longer have to commit to native development, nor do they need to wait for a mature HTML5 spec to build full-featured, cross-platform apps in HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Track Dave and down to say hi or go for a beer if you have any burning PhoneGap questions:)

We’re globetrotting this month, taking PhoneGap to various conferences in Europe and the US. I’m headed to BlackBerry DEVCON September 27-30 in San Francisco.

BlackBerry DEVCON is a great opportunity to see what’s new with BlackBerry apps and check out some new technologies for the first time. The conference is all about sharpening skills, meeting peers and learning about the latest developer tools, which is why we’ll be showcasing PhoneGap at the conference.

If you want to be there, you can get a $150 discount off the current registration price when you use the code DD6SSC when registering.

Conferences are also a great chance for us to meet more of the PhoneGap developer community. If you’re going to DEVCON, I hope you’ll come say hello. We’ll be demoing PhoneGap at a booth on the showroom floor. Hope to see you there!

At Nitobi, we work in a mixed IT environment and use a wide variety of technologies like Ajax, Flash, Flex, Ruby, etc. We also use the Microsoft .NET Framework because more of our clients are investing in .NET these days.

This month, Microsoft is highlighting Nitobi’s use of .NET in a case study posted on Microsoft’s website. The article focuses on the work we do at Nitobi and discusses why and how we’re using .NET.

Here’s a short excerpt from the case study:

To meet its customer’s technology needs and help deliver rich Internet apps, Nitobi determined that adding Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 and .NET Framework 3.5 into its development mix as a way to handle some user interface (UI) technologies would help to improve collaboration and add value to customers already using the .NET Framework.

“Interoperability is something that our customers demand and developers need to boost performance. We felt that including .NET in our development arsenal would help to increase developer collaboration and business agility, which is critical for our success,” says Charland.

Read the complete case study…

Get in touch if you have questions about how we’re using .NET at Nitobi.

Earlier this month we were selected to present at the Web 2.0 Expo’s LaunchPad event, and even better we won the people’s choice award!! I was stoked, the whole team was! It was a big honor. I think my presentation was OK, but it’s really the team, the idea and the community behind PhoneGap that made it a winner!

Here’s my 5 min talk:

Here’s the questions from the judges:

The media, customer and investor interest we’ve had since has been nothing short of amazing.

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