A recent Tweet got my attention... it came from a person boasting about awesome mobile app development using an open source development framework from @phonegap.

Naturally I had to go check out the company! To my surprise, the first thing I noticed from the official twitter account was that the company is from Vancouver BC... nice! I then hopped over to http://phonegap.com/ where are pretty slick website was presented to me touting a service that boasts simple app development for 7 mobile OS platforms.

From the website, "PhoneGap is an HTML5 app platform that allows you to author native applications with web technologies and get access to APIs and app stores"

The idea is that the service leverages existing JavaScript and HTML skills for rapid app development and deployment.

The idea is as follows:

• build your app once
• wrap it up with PhoneGap (using a free openSource framework)
• Deploy to multiple environments

What's very cool is that PhoneGap reports to support the following mobile platforms: iOS, Android, Windows Phone, webOS, Symbian, Blackberry, and bada

• http://www.facebook.com/PhoneGap
• http://twitter.com/#!/phonegap
• http://phonegap.com/feed

Walking through the steps, the site provides simple to use instruction with helpful tips and weblinks, for example, for iOS developers they provide the links needed to quickly access the Apple developer portal to get a membership (required for deployment) and grab the required Xcode. A project download SDK is provided and again detailed instructions and a how to are provided as well. The specific details include sample forms and specific instruction to get up and running. A sample Hello World app is also provided to get you rolling. Then, once finished, a slick emulator is provided so you can test your apps before deploying - very nice!

For developers, PhoneGap provides a number of detailed API reference documents and a comprehensive getting started guide. A toolbox has a number of tools and frameworks to help you along and there's also a nice Wiki... these guys haven't missed anything!

Then there's the Community Tab where you can get more help and meetup with developers using PhoneGap tools. You'll find some useful case study documents, a calendar of developer events where the PhoneGap team will be present. There's also pointers to Google groups, meetup groups, blogs, and an IRC Channel.

See http://phonegap.com and find them on Twitter @phonegap

Video of Dave Johnson, CTO of Nitobi