As demand for iphone and Android apps grows, the Soak team have been getting aquainted with the tools necessary for building mobile applications that run on multiple platforms. Rather than building separate apps for each mobile platform, we can write a single HTML5 application which can take advantage of the latest iphone hardware capabilities, without being limited to the Apple App Store.

Building HTML5 apps with PhoneGap

“PhoneGap is a development tool that allows web developers to take advantage of the core features in the iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and Symbian with a unified JavaScript API.”

It’s not immediately obvious that the applications you create run in the native browser of the mobile device – once you realise this, things make much more sense. Rather than compiling your HTML/CSS/Javascript into an application, it creates an application package (still containing your HTML/CSS/Javascript) that you can then look at deploying and marketing through the Apple App Store and Android Market.

After a bit of research, the server-side team were getting to grips with PhoneGap. PhoneGap allows your JavaScript-savvy Web developer to call native functionality not normally accessible to a Web page running in a browser. This includes basic notifications and vibration, orientation, sms, telephony, and most exciting of all: geolocation and the iphone accelerometer.

Android apps

Rather than worry about your application becoming lost in the never-ending tide of iphone apps, you can open yourself to a wider audience, on the growing Android platform. Here’s a guide to getting PhoneGap working on Android (nb. the instructions in 10b seemed to apply, despite working with PhoneGap 0.9.1).

Once you have a PhoneGap application running on the Android Virtual Device and see the effects of changing the application HTML/CSS/Javascript, it becomes much easier to play around with your ideas, and build functioning applications.

Now, all we need is a shiny new Android, iPhone and iPad for testing!