08.Jun.2010 Taking it further

So I had my Nokia N900. The browser on it is just fantastic, I use it all the time. A problem though is you cant disable pan/scroll/zoom on a page, a crucial feature for most touch screen web apps.

So it was basically while trying to solve that I found PhoneGap, and a fork of it that works with Maemo, the OS of the N900. After I manage to package my then unfinished game with it and installed on my phone I saw for the first time that this game could work great on a smartphone. Around this time I decided to get an iPod Touch and get the game into the iTunes App Store.

So I got my first idevice, and set up the dev environment for it, an adventure in itself. The great thing about PhoneGap though is you only need to use the native SDKs for all the different handsets you want to support when you are packaging the app. Development and testing can be done in the devices web browser, and ofcourse in your desktop browser. Its a really great experience to develop for the web if you compare it to a lot of other stuff. For example reload page to try out changes, firebug, no compilation steps, etc.

In the following blog posts I will go more into detail about doing web development for touchscreen handheld devices, and at the same time support traditional mouse/keyboard desktops.