Book excerpt: Create applications for all major smartphone platforms Creating applications for the myriad versions and varieties of mobile phone platforms on the market can be daunting to even the most seasoned developer. This authoritative guide is written in such as way that it takes your existing skills and experience and uses that background as a solid foundation for developing applications that cross over between platforms, thereby freeing you from having to learn a new platform from scratch each time. Concise explanations walk you through the tools and patterns for developing for all the mobile platforms while detailed steps walk you through setting up your development environment for each platform. Covers all the major options from native development to web application development Discusses major third party platform development acceleration tools, such as Appcelerator and PhoneGap Zeroes in on topics such as developing applications for Android, IOS, Windows Phone 7, and Blackberry Professional Mobile Cross Platform Development shows you how to best exploit the growth in mobile platforms, with a minimum of hassle.