Mobile UI frameworks & other UI scripts

I'm looking for the best cross browser compatible swipe script for android, iphone and other touch phones. Has anyone used any of the available frameworks or have you used custom scripts? What is your experience with these?

SenchaTouch jQTouch Phone Gap U开发者_JAVA技巧nify Project

Any others? I am joining a mobile task force and would like to get more involved in one or more of these communities so I can provide some UI support.

Thanks, Seth

First of all, let's sort out the apples and oranges.

PhoneGap and Appcelerator Titanium are NOT UI frameworks. They are both Web to Native bridging technologies. They provide JavaScript API's for mobile capabilities like accelerometer, contacts, GPS, telephony, etc. Also, they facilitate the creation of a deployable mobile app (versus a web page)

Sencha Touch, jqTouch, and jQuery Mobile are mobile UI frameworks that provide support for mobile UI concepts, like touch, swipe, transitions, small screen sizes, etc. They can run in a pure web page or be used in conjunction with PhoneGap or Appcelerator Titanium in a mobile app.

I'm not too familiar with the Unify Project, but it seems to be a bundle of PhoneGap plus their own UI framework.

Both Sencha Touch and jQuery Mobile are in early days, but already have some great capabilities and they're moving fast.

SenchaTouch is good, but be aware that it provides no native hardware support, so if you need access to the phone hardware, you will need PhoneGap or equivalent.

I hear good things about jqTouch, but haven't tried is personally.

Another option is Appcelerator. If you need to write an app for mobile devices, it is a really approachable framework. You write javascript code, and their machinery compiles it to the appropriate platform. Note that this is for writing apps that run on a mobile device directly, not for writing apps that run in a browser on a mobile device.

I found jqTouch to be great on top of the PhoneGap technology however you need to understand that all the "good looking" UI kits are built on HTML 5 and so far you'll be disappointed with the HTML 5 support from Android devices. You'd think Google would be on this like ants on syrup but you'd be wrong. The jqTouch works like a dream on almost all iOS based devices and quite poorly on most Android devices.

As for Titanium, it still appears and feels web based and there are no UI styles to my knowledge. This means it "attempts" to look native whereas with PhoneGap and JQT you can get a really nice theme. So if you want "snazy" then go PG and something else. Titanium is far more stable than JQT when you're building for iOS and Android so that is a plus but it would be really nice if they did some kind of theme engine.

note over time this answer will become irrelevant as Android improve their HTML 5 support and those UI frameworks become more stable :)