The last weeks we have been pretty active in the mobile world, especially with W3C widgets. We had been in Dresden for the first Mobile BarCamp. The next weekend the Mobile Widget Camp took place and the 25th May was the deadline for “The Competition“, so we were pretty busy getting our widget into great shape (not only good shape!).

The Dresden Mobile BarCamp actually got us really rolling in the mobile space, especially the presentation by the Vodafone guys Daniel and Markus showed us how easy it is to write a mobile widget just using HTML+CSS+JavaScript. I hear you saying “What?”. Yes, you read it right, HTML+CSS+JavaScript. This is what the W3C Widget spec is describing, if you need a quick introduction to it make sure to read PPK’s Introduction to W3C Widgets.
Briefly we learned about PhoneGap but didn’t realize the power of it until about a week later.

The weekend after Dresden we attended the Mobile Widget Camp in Amsterdam, which was the next step even deeper into mobile land. And since we knew that you could present a widget there we chose our EventNinja (formerly known as EventList) widget and ported it to the W3C widget platform, which also turned out to make it pretty easy using the mentioned PhoneGap to run the widget on the iPhone, Android and Blackberry. Where the last two mentioned platforms are only theoretically platforms this widget runs on, because we simply didn’t have no chance to test the widget on them. *hint*

Using the Dojo Toolkit as the JavaScript toolset made the development simple, fast and flexible.

The widget itself didn’t initially start out to be mobile, it was rather the calendar we missed on our website. Look at it, on the right you see the “upcoming events” which are just a widget, we embedded into our site. It also runs (just differently styled) on the dojocampus.org site.

And the mentioned widget competition above actually ended on the 25th May, yesterday. So we put all our efforts into getting the EventNinja widget done. And needless to say, just like a good developer we turned in our work two hours before midnight. The screenshot taken of the widget is of course from it running inside the PhoneGap emulator. (The iPhone “hardware” is just to beautify the screenshot).
But the prelimanary end of the story came back in form of an email, that the widget competition had been extended, the new end is now the 19th June. Guys, what the heck are you doing to us? We fought so hard and love deadlines so much and you just move them away?
What a pity on the one hand but another chance on the other … so let’s see.

And what next? Well, we are looking forward to the mobile20.eu in Barcelona, we will bring the widget for sure and maybe even more cool stuff. See you in Barcelona …