snowNews – App details, the App store, and PhoneGap

MMISoftware has just released snowNews, an iPhone and iPod Touch App (App Store Link), for keeping up to date with news from ski and boarding results around the world.

snowNews was an interesting App to write. It started ‘life’ as a ‘proof of concept’ web app written in HTML5. Coding was very easy, and was carried out in Dashcode (a quite wonderful and often overlooked javascript/css/html5 development tool on the Mac). The App took only a few hours to put together, mainly because of the great rss/xml handing features in Dashcode.

The web app provided useful, and functional. So development started on a Cocoa version…. and then…. PhoneGap.

PhoneGap is an incredibly cool piece of ’software’. As they say on the PhoneGap site: “PhoneGap is an open source development tool for building fast, easy mobile apps with JavaScript.”, and “If you’re a web developer who wants to build mobile applications in HTML and JavaScript while still taking advantage of the core features in the iPhone, Android and Blackberry SDKs, PhoneGap is for you.” Great, In thought. I will give it a go.

Basically, all I had to do was drop the web App developed in Dashcode in to the PhoneGap project and compile. Done. App finished, and it now ran as a native iPhone App.

In fact, snowNews (App Store Link) is the quickest and easiest App we have ever developed. Total development time (including testing), about 2 days.

And it gets better….

The App was submitted to the iTunes App store on Sunday 13 December, 2009 and it went live on Saturday December 19, 2009…. Less than 6 days? The last App we submitted took around 3 weeks…. way to go Apple. And in the last 9 hours the App has been downloads around 20,000 times (if the mobclix data is correct.)