Thanks to some side-projects at work (a hackathon competition, actually) I’ve been introduced to Phonegap and JQuery Mobile. I’ve already converted (re-wrote) one of my iOS native apps using Phonegap + JQuery Mobile. The idea is very appealing, and drastically reduces the amount of time needed to develop a cross-platform “native” mobile application.
Phonegap allows you to develop your mobile applications using HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. It then builds native applications which implement a UIWebView (iOS) for the “native” interface on the mobile device. The icing on the cake is JQuery Mobile, which has some nice “native” looking UI elements and controls. As stated, I rewrote an application that originally took me a week in xCode 5, in 1 day. Not only that, but now that I have the base application written, I can deploy it to iOS, Android, Windows, Amazon FireOs, Blackberry and more with a single command:
phonegap build ios
That single command builds the entire xCode project, which you can then open in xCode, tweak, add iAds, etc.
Creating a new project is very simple:
phonegap create project-name
The other thing I came across was bitbucket.org. Although github is great, private repos will cost you $5 a month for just a handful of them. bitbucket.org (Atlassian) will let you have unlimited private repos.
Find out more about these technologies here:
http://phonegap.com
http://jquerymobile.com
https://bitbucket.org