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

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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 Mobileto 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

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 26, 2012
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 26, 2012
    This is such good news! Sounds like a weekend project is brewing ;)

  • Anonymous
    April 27, 2012
    @Sutikshan, a reduced set of the theme works on Android and iOS. However I suspect users would want a native look and feel, and that is what this theme helps hyrbid app develops do on WP @Jorge, thanks for the note! would love to see what you are brewing :)

  • Anonymous
    April 29, 2012
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 29, 2012
    jqMetro (http://www.jqmetro.com) is where most of the core parts of this Project is coming from! No reference at all. what a shame.

  • Anonymous
    April 29, 2012
    gorgeous? yuck

  • Anonymous
    April 29, 2012
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 29, 2012
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 29, 2012
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 29, 2012
    ...... HAHAAHHAHAHAAHHAHA joke right? this is a joke? yeah... good one.

  • Anonymous
    April 30, 2012
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 30, 2012
    This is great for jQM developers looking to provide a more native look for cross platform apps. Well done!

  • Anonymous
    April 30, 2012
    Great.

  • Anonymous
    April 30, 2012
    Clicking the images opens the JPG file in the same window as the page? Really MSDN?... Won't bother reading if you won't bother with reader experience.

  • Anonymous
    April 30, 2012
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 30, 2012
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 30, 2012
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 30, 2012
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 30, 2012
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 03, 2012
    Is the Pivot Control on the roadmap?

  • Anonymous
    May 07, 2012
    It is not beautiful, just plain, simple and ugly.

  • Anonymous
    May 10, 2012
    But everything isn't capitalized, so this can't be Microsoft's doing...

  • Anonymous
    July 18, 2012
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    July 26, 2012
    Wow I am surprised to reading this interesting concept, yes really now we all are well developed on technologies it no doubt because target is these types of multi mobile platform. So thank you very much for sharing this and I will definitely visit again this website when as soon as possible. http://www.spasentiments.com/

  • Anonymous
    November 01, 2012
    Good information, Your information is very helpful for me. Thank you very much....