PhoneGap – the jury's still out

With the ever unfolding of the interactive marketplace, there are multiple trends developing on multiple platforms, presenting interactive marketers a landscape that daily becomes exponentially more complex. It used to be easy. When creating an interactive project, you picked a platform (Mac, PC or both), you picked a common 256 color palette that would display all of your art correctly, you set your audio to 16bit 22k, and you made it all fit on a CD-ROM. Now you have to pick desktop, web or mobile, then make it cross-browser and test on multiple configurations. And that’s just the technical considerations.
We here at Louisville’s Leading Interactive Agency incorporate mobile development in our media strategies, from texting campaigns to creating apps that run on the mobile platform. The question is, though, how to decide which platform to develop for? iPhone, Android devices or the Blackberry? If only there were some way to take one piece of code, and deliver it to all three platforms in a neat package.
It turns out, there is: PhoneGap. PhoneGap is “a device independent framework for web applications”, according to the site. What it does is allow you to port a web based application to the iPhone, Blackberry and Android device, giving you a quick start guide in their wiki pages (except for the Blackberry; the documentation on that is yet to come). I have a timecode calculator that I wrote in javascript a few years ago, that I have half a mind to convert over to an iPhone app. I will post the results later.