Netbiscuits, a provider of cloud software service for cross-platform development, publishing and monetization of mobile sites and apps, on Tuesday announced the "HTML5+" extension of its Rich UI Development Framework. A set of new rich user interface components allows Netbiscuits' developers to create the most advanced user experiences for mobile web applications using the latest in HTML5 technology.

The extended feature set enables auto-location via GPS (Location Biscuit), animated tickers (Ticker Biscuit) and more advanced image and video galleries (Gallery Biscuit). In addition, Netbiscuits' full Rich UI Framework has been expanded to develop multi-touch navigation, floating layers, swiping galleries, dynamic maps, auto-complete, and get-remote content features for mobile web applications. All rich UI features are adapted to more handsets and platforms, including Windows Phone 7.

"The term 'HTML5+' is our way of defining our approach towards upcoming new technologies in the mobile space", explains Michael Neidhöfer, CEO of Netbiscuits. "We believe that HTML5 as a technology is a great step forward in the creation of mobile web applications which feel like native apps. But HTML5 is not an approved standard, yet.  Consequently, developers will face fragmentation problems resulting from inconsistent HMTL5 implementations on the various mobile software platforms for years to come."

"The mobile market is growing everyday and many developers are frustrated working with development environments which only support the lowest common denominator or only one platform such as iOS", Neidhöfer continues. "Netbiscuits provides solutions for our clients today, which get the best possible user experience out of each device by making the best use of the specific features of any given mobile device."

Many premium customers of Netbiscuits already take advantage of this innovative approach to dramatically increase reach and revenues by covering all mobile devices, not just a few. eBay's new mobile site is a good example: It provides swiping picture galleries for various top categories on many different kinds of touch-enabled smartphones. An overlay menu allows users to load new gallery content without reloading the site completely. Also the search box on top of the site provides a richer user experience being enabled with auto-complete functionality that helps eBay customers to find items they look for faster. When logged in, the eBay site shows a floating menu bar that keeps key menu items always visible on the user's mobile screen, even while scrolling.

"We enable these and other features by providing a vast array of multi-layout building blocks to set up mobile sites", Neidhöfer points out. "Each of these 'Biscuits' is individually adaptable to the capabilities of any specific mobile device. Thereby Netbiscuits is able to exploit the rich, touch-based user interface capabilities of the latest smartphones and guarantees optimized delivery to less expensive but highly popular mass market feature phones as well. Basically, Netbiscuits allows you to use one code source to feed the whole spectrum from the very top down to the very end, enabling mobile websites and native apps via hybrid solutions for all major platforms. This is what we see as the basis for a sustainable mobile web strategy."