More news from MS Open Tech: announcing the open source Metro style theme for jQuery Mobile

Starting today, the Metro style theme for JQuery Mobile, the popular open source mobile user interface framework, is available for download on GitHub and can be used as a NuGet package in Visual Studio.

The theme enables HTML5 pages to adapt automatically to the Metro design style when rendered on Windows Phone 7.5. The Metro style theme is open source and available for download here. This new Metro style theme’s development was sponsored by Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. working closely with Sergei Grebnov, an Apache Cordova committer and jQuery Mobile developer.

The theme looks just gorgeous, doesn’t it?

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The CSS and Javascript theme adapts to the current theme used in Windows Phone and applies the right styling to the jQuery Mobile controls.This allows mobile HTML5 web sites and hybrid applications to naturally integrate into the Windows Phone Metro style experience. This offers developers the choice of rapidly integrating the theme into their existing application but also to contribute to this open source project through GitHub.

You can see an extensive demo of the theme on this page and you can learn more on this site where we are publishing new articles, references and source code sample for developing with Apache Cordova and the Metro style theme for jQuery Mobile.

This is another milestone in our continuous engagement with the community. Our team has been working closely with the Windows Phone division to support the mobile HTML5 and JavaScript open source communities over the last year to bring popular open source projects to Windows Phone:

  • A few months ago, we sponsored the development of full Windows Phone support for PhoneGap (now Apache Cordova), the open source framework that lets applications be built for iOS, Android, Windows Phone and other mobile platforms using HTML5, CSS and JavaScript.
  • At the same time significant improvements were brought to jQuery Mobile (read more about this in our previous blog post): feedback from the community has been great and was partly responsible for our decision to expand our engagement with jQuery Mobile and sponsor this work.

We believe it is important for developers to have choices when targeting Windows Phone, and we also want them to be able to deliver a good experience to the users of their applications, especially when making the choice of using Web standards (HTML5, CSS and JavaScript) to target multiple mobile platforms by picking solutions such as Apache Cordova.

To do so, developers already enjoy a selection of Apache Cordova Plugins that give their application a Windows Phone touch such as Social Share, Bing Map launcher and Live Tile. Now developers can use the new open source Metro style theme for jQuery Mobile to give their mobile apps and websites the Metro style look and feel, and offer the final users an experience similar to the one they get with native applications.

As usual we are very interested in hearing from developers and gathering feedback about the experience of developing HTML5-based applications and websites on Windows Phone. Let us know what other features, tools and frameworks you’d like to see.

Abu Obeida Bakhach
Program Manager
Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.
A subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation

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