Web developers will be able to easily leverage their HTML5 skills to target Windows Phone.
If your not really a phone app developer or if you don't have curricula aimed at a specific mobile platform, you may want to look at the opportunity of the PhoneGap libraries.
So what is PhoneGap?
PhoneGap is an open source mobile framework that enables developers to build applications targeting multiple platforms, by using standard web technologies (HTML5, CSS and JavaScript). On Windows Phone Mango PhoneGap leverages the new HTML5 support provided by IE9.
PhoneGap is currently in beta, but does includes most of the basic features, and includes JavaScript APIs to use Windows Phone Mango features like:
- Access Device Information (UDDI and stuff)
- Add and search Contacts
- Connection status (network / wifi connection status)
- Alerts/Notification (alert and confirm)
- Media Capture (Image and Audio)
- Camera
- Accelerometer
- Geolocation
Here’s a screen shot of the PhoneGap Unit Test application running on the Windows Phone emulator:
This is a new option to build applications targeting Windows Phone and gives your students more choices . PhoneGap is unique as its aimed at Web developers and simply allows them to leverage their HTML5 skills to target Windows Phone IE9 browser.
The beta version of the PhoneGap libraries can be downloaded from: https://github.com/phonegap/phonegap-wp7
Additional Resources
For more details and information please read Nitobi’s blog post to get more details on how the whole process works. With the availability of Windows Phone developer tools, made available freely via DreamSpark to all students and academics and the fact that Windows Phone Mango Released to Manufacturing and developer tools hitting “Release Candidate”, it’s the perfect time to start trying this out.
So please get developing give feedback and join the PhoneGap open source project.