Mobile Awesomeness Blog

The team that brought us the HTML5 boilerplate has now released a mobile version. It's full of best-practices and recommended techniques. Download it today!

DHTMLX Touch is a new mobile javascript framework based on the DHTMLX desktop javascript library. The suite has free and commercial licenses depending on how it's used. It's comparable to previously-covered Sencha Touch. Both have a desktop browser library, great documentation, robust UI components and are meant for web applications. Frameworks like these are what's truly exciting about the potential of web apps on mobile webkit-based browsers.

Zepto is a mobile javascript framework that aims to bring compatible jQuery syntax to mobile devices, while only weighing in at about 2 kb. Any browsers running mobile webkit (iOS, Android and more) should be able to use it.

A pretty cool example that uses Zepto is the new 37signals web app (only for iPad) called Chalk- http://chalk.37signals.com. It's worth a look if you have an iPad!

Jo is a lightweight HTML5 mobile framework that's great for mobile websites or building native apps with PhoneGap. We haven't used it yet, but here is a 12-minute demo of it in action. Visit joapp.com for more ...

On Saturday jQuery Mobile's very first version was let out into the wild. What separates this framework from jQTouch and some of the other mobile frameworks is that it's meant to be optimized for several operating systems, including iOS, Android, Blackberry, Symbian, Palm and more. Our initial tests on iOS were a little clunky, but this is an Alpha release. Nevertheless, jQuery mobile should be a BIG player in the long term.

The jQuery team recently announced their official mobile framework (for phones and tablets), called jQuery Mobile. We think they will be a BIG player out of the gate. The browser support and initial UI controls look fantastic.

Sencha (formerly Ext JS) recently announced a new mobile framework for WebKit browsers called Sencha Touch. This seems to be by far the closest competitor to JQtouch for iOS and Android web development, with some really great functionality right out of the box. Here's a brief demo outlining the framework:

Urban Airship is a service that provides developers with the ability to enable push notifications and in-app purchases in their apps without having to write a bunch of server-side code to communicate with Apple. The big news for web developers using PhoneGap is that Urban Airship push notifications are now supported (not in-app purchases yet). Here is a blog post with the details ...

SproutCore (the javascript library running Apple applications like Mobile Me and iWork.com) now has a "touch" version meant for use on the iPad and iPhone. That's rad. Read all about it here.

PhoneGap is an ambitious open source project that strives to help developers build platform-independent mobile applications using HTML and Javascript. For any web developer, this is music to our ears! And the beautiful thing is ... it works. This framework is a game-changer in the iPhone and mobile web development space.

Writing anything further simply would not do this project justice, so watch this video and learn about it in their words: