I have decided which of the ideas from my constantly gowing list will be my next smartphone app. It's an app for finding online classified ads in Utah. I may expand it to other areas later but for now I'll focus on local ads so I can get something released soon. I'll call it AdFinder for now at least.

I tried out iWebKit with PhoneGap and liked how it looked. I almost decided to use it for my next iPhone app. However, I decided not to for two reasons:
  1. I'm a little concerned about reports on the web of people getting their PhoneGap-powered iPhone apps rejected by Apple for using a "private API". I'd hate to finish a whole app and have it get rejected at the end. It's bad enough that Apple can reject a perfectly reasonable app that's written completely in Objective-C anyway.
  2. I need to parse XML and HTML files with AdFinder. The best way to do this with PhoneGap would probably be to have a web server running PHP. Since I don't really want to set up a web server (yet) just for this app, the only self contained way to parse XML with PhoneGap would be with JavaScript...uh, no thank you!
So I went back to Objective-C (sorry Android, I guess I'll stick with iPhone only for a little longer). Thanks to a great iPhone tutorial I was pleasantly surprised to get a simple RSS reader up in less than an hour! AdFinder is off to a good start.