A little over a year ago, I was drawn to this marvelous device, named the iPhone. All the possibilities that it could bring opening up another outlet for me to develop applications for. Seeing the possibilities, like many developers, I ran out to the nearest Barnes & Noble and bought an “Introduction to iPhone Development” book. I diligently went though each and every chapter, getting acquainted to Objective-C and the iPhone development environment. Then it hit me! Do I want to be an iPhone Developer or a Mobile Developer? What happens when Android gains market share? What about Windows and BlackBerry? iPhone’s reign could only last for so long, and the pack is slowly creeping up.

The iPhone revolution placed blinders on us all, and many of us forgot the obvious. Remember years ago, when you would go to a site only to be greeted with a “Sorry we do not support your current browser, this site is optimized for IE 6″, you would be forced to close you current session on the non-IE browser and open up IE to view the site. What a pain! Eventually, javascript libraries like JQuery, and the adoption of CSS standards have made that less of an issue, although you still see this once in a while. The main difference however between the browser wars, and mobile wars is that browser all interpreted HTML and CSS, with only slight differences. Mobile phone native coding language on the other hand are extremely different. iPhone coding looks very different then Android, which look different the Windows Mobile. That means more resources need to be allocate on a project, costing the perspective client more money. Not exactly a smart investment, and unfortunately there is no “Export to Android” option in Apple’s XCode software.
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Note: XUI is developed for WebKit (hence it’s light weight) since that is the mobile browser of choice for most devices. If something doesn’t seem to work, try using Chrome or Safari since they too use Webkit.

Here is some code for a JavaScript, CSS, Twitter style status text area that i plan on using on a PhoneGap project i am working on. It makes use of the XUI Javascript framework, which i use throughout the project. XUI, compared to other Javascript frameworks is super light, and is developed by the the people behind PhoneGap
You could find the XUI framework at http://xuijs.com/

The code supports:

• 140 character count down
• Visual styling cue when you go over 140 characters
• prompting text when textarea is empty

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