Adobe acquires Nitobi (Founders of Phonegap) | Hacker News Reader

Adobe acquires Nitobi (Founders of Phonegap)

blogs.nitobi.com

121 pointskgutteridge18 comments

The code has been submitted to the Apache Incubator:

http://wiki.phonegap.com/w/page/46311152/apache-callback-pro...

This makes the move to transfer PhoneGap itself to the Apache Foundation all the more reassuring.

I don't know why people are so surprised with this acquisition. Adobe has wanted a piece of the mobile development world for some time (look at the export to iOS they released not too long ago). They already have a decent suite of development tools and this will only make them stronger. A write once, deploy to all strategy is quite appealing, and if Adobe can manage to wrap it all up in to a nice piece of development software, they'd have a real winner on their hands.

The thing is, Adobe has a history of not releasing anything remotely like 'nice development software'.

Even their installers and update processes are universally horrible.

Out of this, I expect some sort of massive IDE targeting mobile devices with HTML5/JS, basically like Titanium only an order of magnitude slower.

I'm not sure why everyone is surprised. Adobe has just come out with a slew of new HTML5 products (Muse, Edge) and they already have Dreamweaver which is typically used for HTML editing.

Adobe doesn't have a strong future with Flash but they still need to support their existing Flash/Flex customers. They can't simply shutdown Flash.

Flash may well die for its current uses, but I think Flash 11+ will be the best cross-browser solution for GPU-accelerated 3D graphics for a while (unless IE adopts WebGL, which I don't think will happen, but I hope I'm wrong).

Unity, one of the most popular game development tools, will soon release a "publish to Flash" option. (Unity can already publish to Windows, Mac OS X, Unity Web Player, iOS, Android, Wii, and soon PS3 & Xbox.)

PhoneGap and Typekit in one day? Two services I love. I see the TypeKit purchase but not exactly this. Because it's well out of what Adobe does, I envision them turning it into some kind of full premium application which would really deter me from using PhoneGap.

PhoneGap did recently launch Build a simpler solution for this and they may keep the old PhoneGap but develop build in a new way but as Adobe were never fans of HTML5 I don't see how this could have a great outcome.

Rather than assume Adobe will veer PhoneGap away from HTML5 interoperability, I take this as a sign that Adobe is instead veering toward PhoneGap and HTML5.

Wow- Adobe really are going on a buying streak these days.

I can see the reason for the TypeKit purchase, but never expected this one. I'm a little concerned, but Adobe have been good on their promise to push HTML5 so far, so I hope that this simply means that PhoneGap has a ton more resources at it's disposal, and not that it'll get forced down some Adobe-centric route.

Actually, the more I think about it, the more it makes sense. Adobe isn't a Flash-only company, but they are invested in cross-platform when it comes to mobile devices. Will be interesting to see what happens.

They had integrated PhoneGap with Dreamweaver 5.5 --- not totally shocking, and makes sense to move more towards html5

Wow, they still make Dreamweaver! I remember trying to make websites in it when I first discovered the internet. Good old days.

I'd be interested to know why Adobe opted to buy the company (Nitobi) rather than the product (Phonegap). Was it already Apache licensed which tied Adobe's hands to lock it down? Or was it more of a talent acquisition?

I also wonder whether Adobe has acquired Nitbobi more for phonegap build and talent than phonegap itself

HN traffic seems to have crashed the site - getting a DB error page.

Is the source code for the Phonegap Build API open?

Damn, I thought Phonegap was going to be good.

It is pretty good already. And since it's open source, there's nothing to stop a community fork if Adobe screws up the stewardship.

NOOOOOOOOOOO..... (as if thousands of linux and webos users suddenly cried for help)

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