jQuery Mobile This looks very interesting, along the same lines as jQTouch and Sencha touch but expanded to devices other than just iOS and Android powered units. This from the jQuery mobile site:
A unified user interface system across all popular mobile device platforms, built on the rock-solid jQuery and jQuery UI foundation. Its lightweight code is built with progressive enhancement, and has a flexible, easily themeable design.
I look forward to playing with it. Provided it is actually “lightweight”.
Classic comments. There are some highly entertaining comments in this post (if you’re following the #thesiswp ‘debate’). By the reasoning of @pearsonified the 27,000 users of Thesis make him “one of the top 3 most important figures in the history WordPress”, so do the 83,000+ users of Redoable (plus however many thousands use it on WordPress.com) make me one of the top two in WP history. Of course it doesn’t. Just one of the many stupid arguments he’s put forward in the last couple of days.
CSS hearts Adobe Just a little something I knocked out quickly this morning to poke fun at the ongoing war between Adobe and Apple. Summary Flash is evil, and Apple have every right to exclude it from the iPhone platform. If you disagree maybe you should check out this link (hat tip: @anthonyshort)
Wanted: 1 dribbble invite A little bit of fancy-pants CSS to construct the dribbble icon just using CSS — no images. The bounce added using a touch of jQuery.
Yay! It worked! Big thanks to Dan for the invite, and you’ll find my dribbbles here (or at least you will once I post some… can’t really do that right now, because I’m at work)
Hahlo 4.1 is here, and its *totally awesome* Hit the link to read the full post on the Hahlo blog detailing the new and improved features in 4.1including lists, retweets and geolocation amongst other things.
PastryKit I spotted the pastrykit.js inside Apple’s mobile help pages ages ago, and at the time I hoped that I might be able to reverse engineer bits of it to work out how the hell it was working…I had no luck at all. It would be nice if Apple would released this to developers but I’m doubtful. I stand by my theory that Apple won’t open up these sort of things (also file/camera access etc) to web developers because they want people to build native apps, not webapps.
How a Web Design Goes Straight to Hell Sad thing is that this is all so true. From personal experience its all usually the direct result of a client and/or marketing department who thinks they know ‘web’ more than the people that they’ve employed to do ‘web’. Pretty sure I’ve experienced every step of this ‘hell’ process in the last six months (or less).
iPhone Web Apps as an Alternative to the App Store Woot, mentioned by name in a daring fireball article, very nice indeed. Gruber makes some good points about why web apps can’t really compete with native apps, and I agree with most of his points, except maybe this one:
Not only are native iPhone apps faster and more capable than their web-app equivalents, but they’re easier to write.
Faster? Yes. More apable? Yes. Easier to write? Unless you know objective-c/cocoa/etc no, not really. if it was that ‘easy’ Hahlo would have stopped being a webapp long ago.
Also on the speed issue, yes the interfaces on a native app are going to be smoother and faster to use than webapps, but in the case of something like a twitter app a lot of that ‘speed’ has to do with the retrieving of the data from the twitter api. There is only one api and both webapps and native apps use it, they both request the same data, from the same source, over the same connection. They have to download the same avatars (poorly resized avatars don’t help download speeds…) etc. this isn’t where the speed issue lies. For example once you’re using Hahlo and all the main UI resources have loaded, your not really requesting much more data than a native app when you view a new timeline, profile, search results etc.
Also, how many native iPhone apps can also be used on Android devices and other devices such as the Nokia N900? Just saying ;p