Cubiq.org is the web log of Matteo Spinelli. Web designer and developer in Florence, Italy.
Scrolling div for mobile webkit turns 3
I’m pleased that my original iScroll was useful to many. In the past months I received dozens emails asking for new features and bug fixes. I think it’s time to start developing a new version of the scrolling div for mobile webkit with added functionalities.
Rotating wheel for your iPhone webapps
In my last post I was suggesting to stop cloning the default Apple UI for web applications and start creating custom controls. This time I want to put my words in practice and present you with a rotating wheel select control, 150 lines of code all included (HTML+CSS+JS).
Don’t go native UI on your mobile web app
In most of my mobile webkit examples I tried to resemble as close as possible the native iPhone user interface. I decided to use a familiar UI just to show off the power of the little mobile browser but I highly discourage using Apple’s graphics for your web applications.
The perfect PHP clean url generator
In my hunt for the perfect clean url (smart url, slug, permalink, whatever) generator I’ve always slipped in some exception or bug that made the function a piece of junk. But I recently found an easy solution I hope I could call “definitive”.
[updated] Spinning wheel on webkit for iPhone/iPod touch
I’m more and more amazed by the power of mobile webkit. I don’t love the iPhone that much, but as a web developer the beauty of CSS transitions, animations and transforms can’t pass unnoticed. This time I’m giving away a widget that resembles the native Picker View (UIPickerView) functionality but entirely built on javascript.
Broken camera takes artistic pictures
Today I have something totally off topic for you. I lent my old digital camera to a friend and this is how it takes pictures once it came back to me.
Remove onClick delay on webkit for iPhone
Developing on the webkit for iPhone I encountered a curious delay on onClick events. It seems that the click is triggered with about 300 milliseconds delay. While this is unnoticeable on a standard web page, it can be annoying on a web application. Fortunately the click event can be overridden thus eliminating the delay.
Contact list on webkit for iPhone
The interest around web development for iPhone rapidly faded out when native applications became reality. The webkit in each and every iPhone/iPod touch is actually so powerful that almost anything done by a native application can be replicated with a spoonful of javascript. Here’s the recipe to bake a contact list with the ABC control to the right, just like the original Apple’s application.
Shutting down linux if a specific process is idle
I built myself a mini-itx linux server that I use as backup and testing platform. To save the planet I forced the small PC to automatically turn off at night, but I wanted to keep it alive if certain processes were still running.
[updated] Scrolling div on iPhone/iPod Touch
Recently I had to develop a web application for the iPhone and I was impressed by the possibilities offered by the little device. You can easily render complex 3d animations with a bunch of CSS rules or save data on a sqlite database, but I was surprised to discover that there is no easy way to scroll the content inside a fixed height div.
Create fixed size thumbnails with ImageMagick
ImageMagick is powerful suite of applications to create, edit, convert and compose bitmap (and some vector) images from the terminal. It’s an essential tool for any web designer if you can get your head around it.
