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Comment by wavephorm | Hacker News Reader

This sounds like exactly what PhoneGap, a superb, free, open-source project accomplishes very nicely.

PhoneGap's great for many purposes, but some developers find it too heavyweight.

We've designed our wrapper and tools to appeal to developers who may not have any mobile dev experience before and who don't need the flexibility to write native code that runs along-side the generated code. Which is why we call it 'wrapped HTML5' rather than 'hybrid'. This means we can make the whole development flow faster and simple.

So, definitely looking to solve the same problems, but we're targeting a different set of developers who value speed and simplicity and may not have any mobile dev experience before.

You're targeting web developers who find PhoneGap too heavyweight, slow, and difficult to learn?

I don't think that's fair. He's targeting every single developer who uses HTML 5 and doesn't do any mobile development at all but could use a wrapper; some of his target is with the competition, some isn't using anything but knows about his competition, and some isn't using anything and DOESN'T know about the competition. You can pick up any of your target from the second two groups with ease, and possibly some of the first category. Think back to the introduction of the iPhone and the smart phone genre. blackberry users would have been the first group.

Does it offer any help implementing Newsstand? All independent publishers would be interested if it made Newsstand completely easy.

Interesting... what sort of thing are you thinking of: the ability to easily manage subscriptions from within an app, or view content, all of the above?

All of the above. Currently, a non-technical user who knows html and web development (or has a designer on staff) can use your software or other open source software to create one magazine issue, and then they get stuck. You need to know objective-c to add Newsstand, and its not very intuitive on how it's set up. You also have to host the files yourself.

What I think small publishers would pay for is code that automatically sets that up for them. For example, something that generates the html that sets up a Newstand page inside the app, and then allows me to enter my information (where my files are stored, price, etc) and then shows me where to insert it into the code (or does it for me). All I would need to do would be to upload my issues to my website. Basically, help people sell their magazines, and people will pay you for it.

Feel free to PM me if you have any questions about the issues we have been having.

I can tell you that you've got at least one guy here interested.

Linux-only guy who wants to take some lightweight weekend web projects and create installable native app versions of them.

PhoneGab doesn't work on Linux and seems like overkill for what I need anyway.

Awesome, sounds like a great match: Sign up and give us a try!

Most of us develop on Linux, so our support there is pretty mature.

There is always room for someone to do it better.

But I would say part of the appeal of mobile development is the joy of using frameworks designed for applications, instead of relying on document frameworks. I wonder why all these cross platform toolkits all hinge on web technologies?

Where are the toolkits in the OpenStep-vein of mobile cross platform software development?

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