Rhomobile recently announced the latest version of Rhodes, its cross platform framework for developing smartphone applications. The Rhodes smartphone app framework enables developers to use existing HTML and Ruby knowledge to build native mobile applications, which take full advantage of smartphone capabilities such as GPS, PIM data, geo-location and camera. Using Rhomobile's RhoSync, users of Rhodes-based applications can work with their synchronized local data even when they are offline and disconnected. The upgrade promises to make it easier for developers to build native mobile apps for most major smartphone platforms, including iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Windows Mobile and Symbian. New features include the ability to debug in real-time and support for database-based logging. Another addition to Rhodes is support for the BlackBerry Java Development Environment v5.0, native mapping for BlackBerry and an API for returning screen size. The screensize API enables developers to conditionally handle different screen sizes smoothly, an important tool when approaching diverse platform environments including the BlackBerry and iPad, according to Rhomobile. After the break is a comprehensive list of new and existing Rhodes features.