Blogs

Hot off the presses. Send your mailing address to alex.samudre [at] nitobi.com and we’ll get you some stickers ASAP.

Stick em in a cool place and send us a photo for even cooler swag!

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*

This morning I watched this discussion of the future of mobile apps with Chris Messian and Ryan Carson. They’ve both done their research on the subject, but as you can tell no one really knows where it’s all going to end up.

“Chris Messina on the topic of the future of mobile web development. We cover interesting issues like mobile web widgets, W3C standards, Open Mobile Terminal Platform (OMTP), BONDI and PhoneGap.”

Interview with Chris Messina from Carsonified on Vimeo.

I agree with Chris that mobile browsers are going to get more powerful, and we hope we’ll get all the device level features we want from JS down the road. In the meantime PhoneGap will can play that role. Eventually we hope PhoneGap won’t have to exist at least in a compiled sense and just and standard API which may eventually become obsolete. Ah wouldn’t it be nice…

We’re really hoping something like BONDI, or BONDI itself, is the way to go. We’re just not sure if we can be the first ones to adopt it. Is anyone else implementing this?

Brian Leroux and Brock Whitten will be in San Jose this Sunday March 1st at the 360|iDev. They’ll be giving a full day seminar on PhoneGap starting with the basics in the morning and helping you build your own iPhone Apps and working on the framework in the afternoon.

What you will learn:

* How to get started building PhoneGap applications
* An overview of Objective-C, Javascript API and XUI framework
* How to overcome barriers to cross-device development
* How to build applications for web-enabled devices with open standards
* How to test and deploy an application to a mobile device
* How to quickly and easily convert web applications to a native mobile app
* Differences in capabilities across devices
* How to retrofit existing web applications to utilize phone features

For more info on 360|iDev or to register go here.

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!

Congrats to Greg Scott and the Jiibe team for taking the 12th spot in this years PICK 20 list. It’s list put together by public selection and the final 20 are ranked by a panel of judges which comprised a group of experts in technology and business. PICK 20 is put on by Backbone Magazine and KPMG.

12. Jiibe
www.jiibe.com

For people considering a career move, Jiibe promises to help them “make better decisions for a happier life.

“I liked this one a lot, Moffitt said. “A fortune is spent recruiting talent. Here, companies and recruits can both benefit through the use of user-generated content and personality testing. Shuttleworth summed it up as “Monster meets Match.com with a dash of LinkedIn, but Geist was more cautious: “It’s an interesting site but I’m skeptical about its ability to deliver.

Nitobi helped Jiibe take their concept from idea to reality, and they aren’t finished yet. Expect more cutting corporate apps company from this start up in the coming months.

A big shout out to some of our other friends like Avi and the crew from DabbleDB, Nick Bouton the one man army behind Protagonize (Nick was also the lead developer on ThoughtFarmer), Weston from SomethingSimpler ,and Coleen from MovieSet! Go Cannucks!

Congrats again guys and keep up the good work!

Duane stopped by the Nitobi Office earlier this year to chat with me about RIAs, what we do and where it’s all going. We also chat a bit about RobotReplay.

I wasn’t sure where it was all heading, but I guess I ended up on the first episode of Duane’s World for Adobe TV. Very cool. If you think you have a topic that would be good for Duane’s show leave me a comment and I’ll put you in touch.

I should call out that Adobe has done a great job with the content and UI of Adobe TV but has failed to provide clean URLs that are actually updated in the address bar. Thus it’s kind of a pain to find and share URLs and impossible to navigate with back button. Too bad it would be so easy to make it a great example of public facing Flex RIA. Someone _high_ and Adobe really needs to start hammering this sort of thing home if Adobe is going to successfully make the leap to Saas and web services. I guess it’s not enough to have Kevin Lynch talking about it. I also can’t resize this video, so it’s best to go to Adobe TV to watch it.

[Disclaimer Duane's a good friend and on Nitobi's Advisory Board]