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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.