Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Develop native iPhone apps in Javascript

With phonegap you can today write iPhone webapps which run on an embedded browser and with a bit of clever CSS styling and JS trickery you can makes those apps smell and feel like native apps. Why not just writing normal browser based web apps for the iPhone ? Well, first you can't sell web apps on the app store and second, phonegap exposes many additional APIs to Javascript based apps.
Soon there will be a new flavor of JS / phonegap iPhone apps: Mike Nachbaur is working on a phonagap branch, which allows (or hopefully soon will allow, I haven't tested yet) to create in JS native Cocoa UI widgets such as tabbars and toolbars. Apple often just follows with Apple-branded versions of what smart developers do ahead of time, so if this will happen in this case as well, I would expect many of the iPhone developers to switch from Objective-C to JS.

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

CodeMirror browser editor got a Lua parser

Try it out. Unfortunately it might take a little while until it will find its way into bespin, because right now, CodeMirror based syntax highlighting in bespin tip is disabled due to some one restructuring of the canvas paint function.