14 DAY TRIAL // Last month, Adobe made a big commitment to HTML5 by acquiring Nitobi, the maker of the fairly popular PhoneGap tool which converts HMTL5 and other web code into native mobile apps.
Immediately, Adobe announced that PhoneGap would be donated to the Apache Software Foundation. The process is underway, PhoneGab is currently an Apache Incubator project and will be called Apache Callback once the transition phase is over.
But all of this turmoil doesn't mean that development has stopped on the open-source tool. In fact, PhoneGap 1.2 has just been made available.
The latest version comes with several new features, for most mobile platforms supported. You can get the full changelog for PhoneGap 1.2 here. Among the highlights is support for Windows Phone 7.
Adobe has been very friendly to HTML5 lately. It realized that people are going to get behind the technology, no matter what, and that sooner or later it would be left behind, if it stuck to Flash.
Instead, it chose to cater to HTML5 developers as well and start building tools that it can sell to them.
For now, its efforts focus on the desktop, but it's looking at the mobile space as well. Even if it has dropped the mobile browser Flash plugin, Adobe still has AIR, which is built on top of Flash, for native apps.
This is perhaps the primary reason why Adobe wasn't that interested in the PhoneGap app itself but rather in the team that built it, a team with obvious experience building HTML5 development tools.
That's not to say that Adobe is not interested in PhoneGap technology or the brand name. In fact, that's the reason for the name change, Adobe plans to keep the PhoneGap Build cloud service which enables developers to get packaged native apps out of the HTML5, CSS and JavaScript code they provide.