Phone Gap's Build Service is Awesome

If you haven't heard of Phone Gap before it's a framework for turning HTML5 applications into mobile applications. I've used it before by downloading the SDK and building apps for both Android and iOS using mainly javascript with a small bit of native code. It's a pretty awesome piece of tech although it can tend to be a bit slow.

Today was the first time I used Adobe's Phone Gap Build Service and I have to say I was extremely impressed. Firstly it's free for opensource apps, it took maybe 2 minutes to setup, integrate with Github and suddenly I had an application targeting :

• Android
• Windows Phone
• Symbian 
• Blackberry
• webOS

Obviously if your using the build service you can't take advantage of native code but still it's pretty epic. I now have an app for several platforms I've never developed for and all I did was point a web page at a git repo. They also give you one private application for free so if you want your HTML5 app on some platforms you'd otherwise never touch with a fifty foot rusty barge pole give it a go. You can see an example download page for my Open Jog app below.

Open Jog for all the Platforms