We’re working on producing a new version of the PhoneGap video (replacing this one). We’re hoping to include short video clips–a montage really–from a bunch of apps built with PhoneGap.

If you’d like your app included, please send it to Darren at darren at capulet dot com.

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I had a really great time at iOSDevCamp Seattle this weekend, put on by Brian Fling and the guys from pinch/zoom. I was fortunate enough to speak there about PhoneGap – you can see my slides above and the video here.

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Nitobi/PhoneGap dev Fil Maj tweeted the other day about this excellent tutorial from Aziz Uysal, describing how to get the BlackBerry SDK and simulator up and running on OS X, for which it has no official support. Using some Eclipse skills and Wine magic, you can pull up the simulator and enjoy all the benefits of BlackBerry dev without booting up a VM.

If you want to run PhoneGap-BlackBerry in this environment, it’s trivially easy. Here’s how:

1. Do everything it says in the tutorial, until you can run a Hello World app in the simulator
2. Clone the PhoneGap-Blackberry repo
3. File -> Import… -> General, Existing Projects into Workspace, then Next
4. Under Select root directory, select /whatever_your_path_is/phonegap-blackberry/framework/ and then select PhoneGap in the Projects field below
5. Add an index.html file to the src/www directory.
6. Open build.xml for editing. Change the jde.home and simulator.home properties to match your simulator location (if you follow Aziz’s tutorial, you can copy these properties from the build.xml of that project). Edit the load-simulator tag (<target name="load-simulator">) to match the other build.xml file also
7. Drag build.xml into the app view (as detailed in Aziz’s tutorial). Then double-click on load-simulator
8. Hit Menu (next to the green button), then Downloads, then PhoneGap
9. Hrrm… ??????????
10. Profit!

Thanks to Aziz for writing such a great tutorial – now we just need someone to get XCode running on Windows 7!

Edit: This tutorial was previous referenced on the PhoneGap mailing list by John Britton – I wasn’t aware until he brought it up in a later message. Thanks for bringing this to our attention John.

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At the PhoneGap Advanced Training yesterday I presented a Deep Dive into the PhoneGap API: what we expose, how to use the APIs, and how is each API is represented/supported on different. I’ve tweaked the slides a bit and put them online, so everyone can see where we’re at: check it out!

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After getting distracted for a while from my port of PhoneGap to Qt for Symbian, I’ve recently jumped back on it, tightening it up a bit and adding some APIs. We now have Geolocation, Vibration, Acceleration, & Orientation working.

Now we already have a Symbian port of PhoneGap working and available, which uses Nokia’s Web Runtime (WRT) technology (which is native to Symbian OS). So why PhoneGap on Qt for Symbian? Well I briefly mentioned some of the limitations faced by using WRT in a previous post; I will touch on those again and expand:

• It is a closed-source proprietary technology, so we cannot actively fix bugs, and we cannot add features (and we want PhoneGap to be open!),
• Performance: when I ported a PhoneGap application developed and tested on the Palm Pre to PhoneGap Symbian WRT, I found that its javascript animation was completely lost. It would get from state A to state B, but the animation in between was non-existent. I originally assumed my phone simply could not handle the animation … until I tried it using PhoneGap Qt for Symbian. It worked.
• Memory: I tried using prototype.js in one of my PhoneGap WRT applications … it would crash immediately upon opening the application simply from the volume of javascript being loaded. Which reminds of when I first started developing with Web Runtime, and my applications would intermittently crash. Initially I would be chasing down the line of code which was crashing the environment … until eventually it became clear that we were simply running out of memory. Wasted a fair bit of time looking for non-existent bugs.

Now PhoneGap Symbian for Qt is still young and perhaps as it grows, it will face the performance & memory issues mentioned above. But for now things are running much smoother.

So far my testing of PhoneGap Qt for Symbian has been limited to my little PhoneGap API demo app, so more testing is definitely on my plate. The platform uses Qt Webkit, which appears to be very modern and so far has worked very nicely for me. Flick-scrolling is not native to the Qt Webview, so I may have to try implementing that as well. But to summarize, PhoneGap Qt for Symbian is now available, though not yet API-complete. Clone it, Get Started, and let me know if you have questions, comments, or suggestions. Or contributions!

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PhoneGap has been getting a lot of attention lately, and also a lot of questions on the mailing list about where to get started.
I recently built a small PhoneGap app for iPhone that helps to demonstrate PhoneGap functions.

The application is divided into multiple pages, and each page focuses on one area of functionality.
I have strived to keep each page dedicated to the functionality it presents, and present everything as simply as possible.
There are no dependencies on any other libraries, and the js / css for each page is contained directly there.

The Notifications page demonstrates key navigator.notifications functions.

• Custom Alerts – with custom title text, and button text.
• Display a loading screen for a fixed length of time
• Vibrate the device
• Show and hide the Activity Indicator ( the spinner at the top bar )

The Accelerometer page demonstrates navigator.accelerometer functions.

• Start + Stop the accelerometer update logic, and play with a bouncing ball.

( a shout out to Yohei for providing the initial code for this example. )

The Contacts page demonstrates navigator.contacts functions.

• Display the number of contacts
• Spawn the contact picker screen
• Renders a contact, and makes it clickable, to spawn the contact viewer.

The GeoLocation page demonstrates how to use navigator.geolocation

• Gets your current location
• Calls Twitter api using JSONP to get tweets within a mile of your location

( a shout out to Girlie Mac http://girliemac.com/blog/ this code was shamelessly borrowed )

Hopefully the other platformers will step up and publish / test on other devices.  I have only worked on the iPhone branch so far.

I will be working on the Media api next to demonstrate how easy it is to play mp3s within PhoneGap, and I might even post some of my own music, we’ll see.

Get it while it’s hot! http://github.com/phonegap/phonegap-iphone

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In 2009, we taught in-person PhoneGap training sessions in San Francisco, Vancouver and New York. We also heard from PhoneGap users who couldn’t attend our classes and wanted an online alternative.

We’re happy to oblige–we’ve scheduled two online PhoneGap webinars for later this month. We’re offering an introductory session and an advanced class. Each course is three hours in duration and will be taught by the Nitobi developers who created PhoneGap. Here are the details:

Mobile App Development with PhoneGap – Introductory Course

In this hands-on tutorial you’ll discover how to use your HTML/JavaScript skills to build applications for mobile platforms including iPhone, Google Android, Blackberry, Symbian and Palm. Learn how to use PhoneGap to create platform-neutral mobile applications with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Get the tools and experience you need to build app store ready mobile applications.

January 21, 2010
10:00 AM to 1:00 PM, PST
Cost: $99 USD
For more information and to register, click here.

Mobile App Development with PhoneGap – Advanced Course

Are you ready to take your PhoneGap apps to the next level? In this advanced mobile app development training workshop, you’ll learn how to:

• Extend PhoneGap and work with plugins
• Dive deep into mobile JavaScript to build complex apps
• Work with XUI
• Take your PhoneGap apps offline
• Work with GitHub and contribute back to the PhoneGap project.

At the end of this PhoneGap master class, you will have all the knowledge to build complex, cross-platform mobile apps with advanced GUIs and functionality using the PhoneGap open source framework.

January 28, 2010
10:00 AM to 1:00 PM, PST
Cost: $99 USD
Fore more information and to register, click here

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So, apparently I forgot to mention the build.rb script I wrote last year. It’s checked into the phonegap-android repository, and you can pull it. To use it, you just have to do the following:

1. First, build a PhoneGap.jar (this should be built before being distributed in future releases)

ant jar


2. Run build.rb with the various attributes:

ruby build.rb TestApp com.testapp www /foo/bar


3. Profit.

You should have a test application created. The application name should have no spaces, and it’s expected that you know enough about Android development to change the res/values/strings.xml file to what you want it to be (you don’t need to know much). The www directory should have an icon.png in it for the icon that you want to use with your application. It’s an early script, and it’s an intermediary step that’s designed to make life easier for those who don’t want to bother with Eclipse.

Also, many people go here to post bugs. While I appreciate all the comments I get on Android, it works better if the bugs are also filed in the PhoneGap bug tracker. That way I can keep track of what’s broken. It’s also the place to put feature requests, since like the Android developers themselves, I will often not reply to the forums because I’ll be too busy with other tasks. I hope to have a plugins project added here soon.

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