Podcast Interview: PhoneGap — Cross-Platform App Development Using HTML, CSS and JavaScript

PhoneGap offers a way of creating iPhone apps using HTML, JavaScript and CSS. PhoneGap provides JavaScript interfaces to location services, accelerometer, contacts, vibration and sound.

What’s more, PhoneGap is cross-platform, so apps can run with little or no modification on Android and BlackBerry too.

In this interview, Rob Ellis and Brock Whitten talk about how PhoneGap works, the mobile aspects of the HTML 5 spec, how to get started with PhoneGap, issues surrounding getting PhoneGap apps into the store and more.

You can listen using the Flash player below, download the MP3, or subscribe to the iPhone Developer Podcast using the instructions at the bottom of this post.

For easy scanning of the interview, here is what was covered and when:

• 1:00 – PhoneGap overview
• 2:00 – HTML 5 spec mobile functionality
• 4:00 – PhoneGap as a “template application”
• 5:00 – Getting starting
• 6:00 – How the embedded browser makes calls into Objective-C code responsible for the functionality, how the Objective-C functionality pushes results back to the browser
• 8:00 – No shenanigans: all done legitimately within the SDK
• 9:45 – Javascript programming model/paradigm
• 10:45 – PhoneGap app store rejections
• 14:30 – XUI: a lightweight, 2K, mobile targeted JavaScript toolkit
• 17:00 – Creative native-look HTML UIs
• 19:30 – Building for cross-platform
• 28:00 – Using the Dashcode to build mobile web UIs

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