Digital Dandelion

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Hi, I’m Jeremiah Cohick at Digital Dandelion. Sony Ericsson asked us to build a mobile app a week before Web 2.0 Expo in New York City. We thought, “Yikes.” Then they showed us the new Sony Ericsson Web SDK. It’s based on the open source PhoneGap project and allows you to use web technologies to build mobile apps.

Traditionally, mobile web apps have had to run in device browsers that haven’t had access to the differentiating features of your phone (like accelerometer data or your photos and contacts). Monetization has also been difficult because web apps haven’t had access to the popular app distribution channels. And mobile browser wonkiness didn’t allow for quality user experiences.

PhoneGap allows web apps to be first class citizens on mobile platforms. It does this by running webpages inside of a native application and providing a JavaScript bridge library to access device features. When you’re done, compile and distribute like any other app.

PhoneGap allows you to use familiar and accessible technologies to get your app onto iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Symbian, and webOS quickly. It’s not perfect for every type of app, but if you can build in a browser, you should. and PhoneGap lets you.

To get started, download PhoneGap, setup the mobile development environment of your choice, build a web app, test, and compile.

For the Mavericks sample application we built for Sony Ericsson, we mocked up our app in Photoshop, converted the visual design into HTML and CSS, used the MooTools JavaScript framework to add interactions, and implemented the Google Maps and Twitter APIs just like we would on a website.

Two things to keep in mind: PhoneGap will load and display pages from a local file system, so you can’t do AJAX calls to local files. Also, HTML 5 database storage isn’t implemented yet but it’s coming in Android 2.

PhoneGap and the Sony Ericsson WebSDK make it possible for web developers to maximize their access to the mobile market.

Be sure to check out the sample application we built. Make it even better and enter it into the Sony Ericsson Web App Challenge for a chance to win cash and other great prizes. Thanks for listening. Now, go make something cool.

Resources

• Getting Started: http://digitaldandelion.net/blog/
• Mavericks App: http://bitbucket.org/digitaldandelion/mavericks/
• PhoneGap: http://phonegap.com/
• Sony Ericsson WebSDK: http://developer.sonyericsson.com/

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