PhoneGap announced full support for Windows Phone 8, with the release of its latest version 2.3.0. PhoneGap has already announced it’s support for Windows 8, soon after the release of the flagship Microsoft OS last year.
The new version will allow developers to write apps for Windows Phone 8, in addition to the already well-supported Windows 8 and Windows 8 RT platform. Over the last few months, guys at PhoneGap had been working to bring Windows Phone 8 to Apache Cordova. The launch of this version was made possible by some major contributions from Microsoft itself, to the Apache Cordova project. You can view more details about PhoneGap and Windows Phone 8 in Jesse MacFadyen’s blog post.
This release includes the first cut of the long awaited InAppBrowser API (formerly called ChildBrowser). The InAppBrowser is a built-in web browser for your app that has an API that follows web standards. What’s new with the InAppBrowser implementation for iOS is, the white-list is not applied application wide anymore, the white-list will only apply for the main Cordova UIWebView only. Now you can load non-white-listed URLs into the InAppBrowser and the ChildBrowser.
In addition to the InAppBrowser API, the released announces a number of bug fixes. Major bugs fixes like the ones in adding a Photo from a HTTPS address to Contact, or firing of Online/Offline events on subsequent pages of an app have been made. With this release PhoneGap also dropped support for iOS 4.x, while going forward with only iOS 5.0 and greater. If you are interested in taking a peek into it’s source code, drop in to
it’s Git commit.
Though the support from PhoneGap Build for this release is not available yet, according to ‘PhoneGap community champion’ Steve Gill, the team is hard at work on supporting this latest released for PhoneGap. Until then, you can start getting your hands dirty with some Windows Phone 8 development with PhoneGap!
