For the past week, I’ve been neck-deep in a challenging project that combines jQuery Mobile and PhoneGap to do some relatively heavy lifting. Though I’ve used both jQuery Mobile and PhoneGap in the past, this recent exercise left me with a few morsels of newly-hard-earned knowledge. Among that education was learning that PhoneGap 1.1.0 breaks jQuery Mobile’s back button on Android devices.

Being able to use a web-based framework like jQuery Mobile to create a “native” mobile app is one of PhoneGap’s most appealing propositions. So, you can imagine my dismay when wrapping this latest project in PhoneGap broke its navigation. Worse yet, even closing jQuery Mobile’s dialog windows stopped working under PhoneGap 1.1.0.

Luckily, the problem ended up being a minor one with a simple fix. In this post, I’ll briefly show you why PhoneGap 1.1.0 caused jQuery Mobile’s back buttons to stop working and how you can fix that problem in your own app.

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Developing iPhone-optimized portions of an ASP.NET website presents a challenge. More specifically, it’s testing your creations that can be difficult.

Apple’s iPhone emulator only runs on Macs and the Windows-based alternatives don’t emulate mobile Safari well. That leaves us using an actual device as the only high-fidelity option for testing. That’s not all bad; especially when it comes to a touch-driven interface, testing with the real thing is preferable.

Unfortunately, the ASP.NET Development Server bundled with Visual Studio is severely restricted when it comes to testing externally. In fact, it could hardly be more restrictive – it refuses all external connections, even if those connections originate from the same local subnet.

In this post, I’m going to show you one way I’ve found to circumvent that restriction, how to configure your iPhone to take advantage of that, and how to connect to the development server once those steps are completed.

Note: This post specifically describes configuring an iPhone, but the same approach will work for any mobile device that supports using an HTTP proxy.

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