Apple's WWDC 2009 – See you there!

I will be representing Nitobi at Apple’s WWDC 2009 in San Francisco, and will be in the various after-conference parties about town. I will be in SF from Sunday June 7th to Friday afternoon June 12th.

If you’d like to meet up and chat, send me an e-mail at shazron@nitobi.com or ping me on Twitter. See you there!

The State of PhoneGap with Windows Mobile

Well there is no state really, except for the proof of concept currently (by PhoneGap contributor Jose Noheda). I was re-factoring the PoC code, and getting everything working with the PhoneGap Javascript common code. In a nutshell, PhoneGap WinMo cannot use the existing PhoneGap js [1], as js support in the IE control in WinMo is too primitive. The current IE in WinMo is based on desktop IE 4 (released in 1997) and only supports JScript 3/Javascript 1.3.

So where does this leave PhoneGap WinMo? These are the ways we can proceed:

1. Have a totally separate Js codebase, based on JScript 3, for WinMo. Con: Maintenance nightmare?
2. Upgrade to IE Mobile 6. This discussion has its own section, below.
3. Use WebKit with Qt [5]. Pro: We can probably use Qt Webkit in Nokia phones (soon, not supported yet), because well, Nokia owns Qt. Con: Using Qt adds a 10MB overhead, minimum.
4. Use our own WebKit control. Con: I don’t know how long this effort will take, and it is the riskiest.

Internet Explorer Mobile 6

IE Mobile 6 is based on desktop IE 6 (which was released in 2001) but with the IE 8 Javascript engine [2]. However, only newer (unreleased as of yet) phones will get this version, according to Microsoft [3]. Although there are development emulator images available, they are no substitute for testing on a device.

Even if we somehow get IE Mobile 6 on existing phones (with unofficial ROMs, eg through xda forums[6]), .NET code cannot take advantage of this, because Microsoft does not want to break existing compatibility with existing code that uses hosted controls [4].

Footnotes:

[1] Sample PhoneGap Javascript code that fails under IE Mobile 4 JScript http://pastie.org/485649

[2] IE Mobile 6 release blog post http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsmobile/archive/2008/11/11/internet-explorer-mobile-6.aspx

[3] IE Mobile 6 will not be available for current phones http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsmobile/archive/2008/11/11/internet-explorer-mobile-6.aspx#9063740 [All comments were deleted after the fact by MS]

[4] IE Mobile 6 will not be available in hosted controls (ie .NET WebBrowser component) http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsmobile/archive/2008/11/11/internet-explorer-mobile-6.aspx#9064039[All comments were deleted after the fact by MS]

[5] Qt toolkit http://www.qtsoftware.com/

[6] XDA Developers forum http://forum.xda-developers.com