I was talking with a colleague who writes mobile apps asking about how he writes code efficiently for the different mobile operating systems. He was saying that, “PhoneGap is the leader right now for cross mobile.”
I found PhoneGap at www.phonegap.com. They say, “PhoneGap is a free and open source framework that allows you to create mobile apps using standardized web APIs for the platforms you care about.” That[‘s pretty much what I have been looking for. A place where you can write your app, and then port it to multiple devices.
While I was looking for PhoneGap I came across an effort on GitHub which is just coming into fruition called Mobile Chrome Apps, https://github.com/MobileChromeApps/mobile-chrome-apps. They are taking the approach of writing a Chrome app that can run in Windows, OSX, Linux and ChromeOS. Once that is working you can use their toolkit to port the code to run under Android and IOS. That covers even more platforms.
Now you know about a couple of tool kits allowing you to write your app and have it operate in multiple environments. It will be interesting to see what concessions you have to make in order to write an application that works as expected in each of the different platforms. That seems to be the difficult part of multi-platform coding.
For those of you considering mobile device development, this may be of interest. Feel free to share any insight you have in this area here online or by email to btaylor@sswug.org. Do you have anything allowing the code to port into the Windows Phone platform?
Cheers,
Ben