I stumbled across this article that has some good tips for developing rich web based mobile apps for the iPhone and other devices using just html,css and javascript. These tools look like they could be pretty useful if you want to ‘mobilize’ the content of your existing website but don’t want to go through the hastle of developing a new app for each new platform in C or Java.

What is PhoneGap?

PhoneGap is a development tool that allows web developers to take advantage of the core features in the iPhone, Android, and Blackberry SDK using JavaScript.

iui

Based on Joe Hewitt’s iPhone navigation work, iui has the following features:

* Create Navigational Menus and iPhone interfaces from standard HTML

* Use or knowledge of JavaScript is not required to create basic iPhone pages

* Ability to handle phone orientation changes

* Provide a more “iPhone-like” experience to Web apps (on or off the iPhone)

While the ‘apps’ that you craft with these tools won’t be quite as fully featured as those that are native to the phone’s OS…they are certainly a great time saver and are relatively simple to update and maintain.