It has been an exciting for some of our favorite cross-platform tools.  Both Apache Cordova (fka PhoneGap) and jQuery Mobile have pushed major releases to the community.  Kicking things off earlier in the week was the Apache Cordova project with their 1.6.1 release.  This is a very big release for the project as it unifies all the development under Cordova-JS.  Previously all the development for each platform sort of lived in its own bubble maintaining their own JavaScript files that implemented an agreed upon API. Now under Cordova-JS, there is now a consistent unifying set of JavaScript files that implement the cross-platform API all under one repository. This meas that Cordova-JS is now on Android, iOS, Windows Phone and BlackBerry!

The release also includes a variety of bug fixes across the board and even a few new features sneaked in.  If you deploy your app on iOS you will be very pleased to find that the nasty local storage bug caused by the iOS 5.1 update has been fixed!  As always for all the goodness, check out the official blog post that highlights all the detailed changes.

Next up is jQuery Mobile with their 1.1.0 release. The most notable improvements in 1.1.0 are true fixed toolbars, completely re-vamped animated page transitions and AJAX loader, refined form element design and feature set, and improved documentation.  In addition there has been a tremendous amount of small and big bug fixes and enhancements.  The team has taken a real focus to performance and this release really marks jQuery Mobile as a production ready user interface library.

There is an abundance of details in the official release notes which you should definitely review especially if your upgrading from 1.0.1.

The folks working on the Apache Cordova project (formerly known as PhoneGap) have been busy getting their ducks in a row and have released version 1.5.0.  This release appears to be centered around some house cleaning and maintenance as they transition from PhoneGap to the Cordova brand.

From perusing the change log there is no one thing that stands out  however it seems that many of the bug fixes that made it into the release are centered around Android.  As always you should be sure to check out the formal release notice and can grab the latest and greatest build from GitHub.

Just a note that even though things are transitioning nicely to the Cordova brand, the PhoneGap website is still the go to place for documentation and announcements.

Just in time for the Valentines Day rush, Mobile Florist makes its debut on the iPad.  Now you can be sure to take care of that special someone on Valentine’s day no matter where you are.

Mobile Florist is a leader in mobile device floral ordering and delivery services. Mobile Florist fulfills all orders utilizing the Florists’ Transworld Delivery (FTD) network to the US and Canada. This means that your order is handled by a local florist in the recipient’s area which guarantees quality and freshness.  There are no overnight voyages in dark boxes that test the tensile strength of cardboard. In most cases we can even offer same day delivery!

Syntactix is also proud to be pioneering the way as this is only the second app for iOS to be approved using the recently open sourced Enyo framework.  We are big fans of the framework from our work with HP webOS and look forward to making it a key tool in our cross platform strategy.

If you’re tired of the same old square-shaped numeric “brain builder”, then this is the app for you. Tridoku is the perfect “brain builder” app for ALL AGES. The rules are extremely simple; however winning will not come easy! Tridoku excels beyond its predecessors by ditching the traditional square game board for a series of eighty one interlocking triangles. The player must fill each and every triangle with the numbers 1-9 while satisfying the same criteria found in its Sudoku cousin.

In addition to offering unlimited game play that’s as rewarding as it is challenging, Tridoku is one of the most effective “brain builder” apps on the market, improving pattern recognition skills and developing new ways to pump some serious cognitive iron! Tridoku offers players over 500 puzzles of varying difficulty and uses a scoring system that rewards players for strategic cognitive thinking rather than simply tracking how fast you can solve the puzzle.

Update: PhoneGap 1.4.1 was released this morning to address a bug introduced in 1.4.0 that disable orientation changes for iOS devices.

PhoneGap has released version 1.4.0.  Although from the change log it may seem Android got most of the love, this release has an abundance of fixes for all platforms across the board.

One very important fix for Windows Phone 7 developers thanks to Jesse Macfadyen (@purplecabbage) is when using JQuery Mobile, the ability to now define multiple pages/screens within a single document.   This had previously hindered many developers from porting their work to the platform.

Be sure to check out the full change log for the specifics and on GetHub for the latest cutting edge updates and or to help contribute to the project.

HP has finally released their road map for open sourcing their mobile platform webOS.  But its not only the webOS faithful that are celebrating but the mobile development community as a whole.  Open sourcing a large platform like this will take some time and is no overnight task.  There are many aspects of the platform that will need to be patched or replaced to oblige with external licenses and agreements HP entered into during development.  Eventually the whole webOS platform will be open sourced and the timeline to do so can be found here. So to get the ball rolling and kick things off, HP has released Enyo under the Apache 2.0 license.

For those not familiar with webOS’ app development strategy, webOS applications are built primarily using web technologies like HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript all while providing the ability to do any “heavy” lifting that may be required via C/C++. Enyo is the application framework that webOS developers use to create their apps.  The framework defines both UI elements and event driven logic while promoting solid software engineering practices of encapsulated and modular code.  The UI elements were developed with multiple screen resolution and sizes in mind so they were designed to be fluid and adaptive.  An even better aspect of the framework is because it is built using web technologies, it is not really limited to just webOS. In fact, it can currently run anywhere there is a web-kit based browser!  This allows you to use all the great debugging features of modern browsers, in fact you can do the majority of your apps development in the browser before even having to setup a platform specific project!

As mobile developers, we want to reach as many people as possible with our products with the least amount of overhead necessary.  Building and maintaining an app for each mobile platform not only significantly increases the overhead and development costs, but also stifles competition in the mobile platform market. Developers are forced to pick and choose where to optimally apply their limited resources and emerging mobile platforms won’t gain the traction they need to succeed without developer support.  Without getting into the native vs. HTML5 debate, it is things like Enyo that when coupled with a cross-platform device framework like PhoneGap or Titanium, that we really start breaking down the unique app per platform barrier and promote mobile platform innovation.  It doesn’t stop there though, Enyo also makes a great framework for web app developers and provides them a great way to ensure their web app is both desktop and mobile optimized.

The Enyo application framework has been released in two bundles.  The legacy Enyo 1.0 framework was targeted specifically to run on the HP TouchPad and was thus optimized for that hardware.  As a result there are certain aspects of the framework that may not perform as well or not work at all on other devices.  Enyo 2.0 is optimized for multiple devices and will remove the web-kit only browser limitation.  Currently only the core of Enyo 2.0 is available as the UI elements will not be available till next month.  Also HP has setup a great community site (Enyojs.com) where developers can not only get help with using the framework but since it is open source you can contribute to its growth!

As anticipated, JQuery Mobile released their 1.0.1 maintenance update yesterday.  This release brings a long list of fixes, performance tweaks and small improvements.  It was not all janitorial work though, one of the highlights of this release is support for Samsung’s Bada platform which is currently being merged into the Tizen project.

The team did a great job of exterminating bugs and tuning the engine so the change log is quite long.  You can get all the gory details over on their blog and the team will now be focusing on finishing up version 1.1.0 for later next month.

Today, JQuery Mobile, one of the top mobile user interface frameworks, blogged about their upcoming 1.x releases and their plan to consistently release updates every 3 months.  For developers new to the HTML5 cross-platform development strategy, JQuery Mobile is a javascript framework focused on providing a mobile user interface.  It can adapt your webapp content for either phone or tablet devices, and it can be coupled with a device framework like PhoneGap to create a cross-platform native application.

Release 1.0.1 will be primarily a maintenance and cleanup release after hitting their v1.0 milestone.  Developers should see this release available within the coming weeks.

Release 1.1 will look to smooth out page transitions and achieve true fixed toolbars. It will also add some other goodies such as AMD support and a new download builder tool. The AMD support will address framework dependency issues, and the download builder will allow you to build custom framework using only the pieces you need. Also in this release, the iOS-only touchoverflow feature will be deprecated. Implementing the fixed toolbars duplicated much of the code with similar performance, plus the fixed toolbars are compatible with any mobile OS.  Developers should expect this release to land anywhere from mid to late February.

While Release 1.1 will focus on the core of the framework, Release 1.2 should add some new widgets while phasing out some aging ones and do some additional cleanup. The JQuery Mobile team is still honing in on the scope of Release 1.2, but they have hinted at a new popup widget and a really cool utility dubbed Fetch Links.  Fetch Links can be used to make a tab strip, a slideshow, create a “load more” or “pull to refresh” feature in a list view, or simply update any portion of the page based on user activity.  Developers can expect this bountiful harvest of updates sometime in early Spring, 2012.

It is great to see such wonderful things coming for one our favorite cross-platform UI frameworks but don’t take our word for it. Check out the full blog post for all of JQuery Mobile’s technical goodies, and give it a try today!

What is it?

The HP Enyo framework for webOS is one of the best mobile HTML5 based frameworks out there to work with. With HP’s recent decision to exit the mobile hardware market and no clear visible future in sight, developers of the platform are left in quite a quandary. So what’s a developer to do? Go cross-platform of course! PhoneGap is usually the standard fare to go about such an endeavor but it lacks a user interface component as it focuses on abstracting the hardware and Operating System components. What you don’t want to learn yet another mobile UI framework? Well since Enyo is HTLM5 based it is a perfect compliment to PhoneGap and you already know it (if you don’t it is very easy to learn). Unfortunately at this time though, it is against the Enyo user license to distribute it on other platforms (If you can’t wait for HP to release Enyo, we recommend checking out Jo or JQMobile as alternatives). We have high hopes that this will change though since it such a great fit for PhoneGap and when it does some of the controls that have webOS specific API dependancies will need to be recreated to use the PhoneGap APIs. So this brings us to Eirene, a collection of Enyo controls that work with the PhoneGap API’s.

What’s in a name?

Since Enyo is the goddess of war, we decided that our control collection should be named Eirene after the goddess of peace since cross-platform controls are designed to bring peace to the battles developers face when choosing what platforms to develop for.

You can help!

All the controls we create for Eirene will be Open Source and hosted on GitHub. So fork us and give a hand with development, testing, or take them for a spin in your own PhoneGap project!

Today’s 3.1.12 release of Pack ‘n’ Track brings the full tablet experience to the HP TouchPad. All the features of the webOS phone version now taking advantage of all that glorious TouchPad real estate. Track all your FedEx, UPS, USPS, and DHL packages every step of the way. From the comfort of your TouchPad, you will be notified whenever your package’s status changes so you know what and where your package is. Need to give someone a heads up on your package? Then easily share your package’s status with a tap of a button.

That’s not all though, if you already own the award winning phone version, you get the TouchPad upgrade FREE! Don’t already own Pack ‘n’ Track, then you will get both versions for one low price!

A special thank you goes out to Richard Kerris and the entire HP webOS Developer Relations team for helping to make this happen.  Just in case no one has told you recently, You Rock!