/ Tag Archives: mobile dev
> Build and publish an HTML5 game for iPad – Part 3
A bit late on the roadmap due to an hard disk failure, here comes the third episode of the saga. This time I'm going to show you a quick screencast and you'll finally discover what the game will be about. Read more »
> Build and publish an HTML5 game for iPad – Part 2
The HTML5 game development holds steady, last week I was experimenting with web sql, localStorage and the PhoneGap APIs. I admit that it is slightly more complicated than I initially estimated, but it wouldn't be fun if it weren't challenging. Read more »
> Build and publish an HTML5 game for iPad
This is the first of a series of posts about a project/experiment I'm currently working on. The challenge is to build a pure HTML game (no canvas) for iPad and publish it to the Apple Store. Here you'll find my day to day experience, suggestions and pieces of code. Read more »
> SwipeView
SwipeView is the super simple solution to endless seamlessly loopable carousels for the mobile browser. It's memory conservative as it uses only three elements at any given time, it's smooth as velvet since it takes advantage of hardware acceleration, it's bandwidth friendly with its 1.5kb minified/gzipped footprint. Read more »
> iScroll 4
iScroll finally received a complete rewrite. Now it's smoother than ever and adds some new important features: pinch/zoom, pull down to refresh, snap to elements and more custom events for a higher level of hackability. Read more »
> Device motion + websockets demo
iOS 4.2 is finally out and it adds a couple of new important tools to the web developer's arsenal: websockets and devicemotion. The former makes client/server communication a snap, the latter brings accelerometer support to the browser. I wanted to test both technologies and see what problems might arise. It has been a very interesting experience, here're my impressions. Read more »
> Testing memory usage on mobile Safari
How many elements can I load into the iPhone browser before it crashes? I've been asked this question many times. We don't have memory management on Safari mobile browser, and we don't know when it is going to crash. This level of uncertainty bothered me enough that I decided to do some (admittedly empiric) tests. Read more »
> Follow along floating layer
We have to find smart alternatives to meet the lack of position:fixed on iPhone. If you don't need the complexity of iScroll you may find this script useful. All it does is to move a layer together with the page scroll position. If you are familiar with the mobile Gmail web app you should know what I'm talking about. Read more »
> You shall not flicker!
Off screen items on iScroll are not cached by the mobile browser, when it comes their turn to appear on screen they need a few moments before being accessible, creating a nasty flickering. Well, there's an easy trick to force the browser to cache all elements and it's so simple I regret not having tried it before. Read more »
> Do you really need jQuery (for mobile dev)?
I love jQuery, I use it everyday, you can spot it even on this blog. It's a life saver in the times of desktop browser discrepancies (yes, I'm talking to you IE), but modern browsers and specifically mobile browsers are good enough not to need any bloated framework on their shoulders. In this post I'm showing you that 90% of the times you are using a framework for nothing. Read more »
> HW Accelerated Accordion
Accordion on mobile webkit is a bad beast. The accordion effect is usually obtained by reducing/incrementing the elements height. Unfortunately, on mobile, height and width are two not hardware accelerated properties, which means choppy animations. Fear not: I just baked for you a translations-only height-changes-free accordion for all your mobile needs. Read more »
> Dealing with the bottom browser bar on mobile Safari
If you use iScroll or any web app that takes advantage of touch events you'll sooner or later stumble in an annoying bug: when you swipe over the bottom browser bar the touchend event is not fired and the application freezes. Here I'm trying to explain why this happens and how to fix it. Read more »
> Slide-in menu
Sometimes the screen of mobile devices is too small to fit all the controls, menus and options of your application. One solution is to create a slide in menu that the user can pull to access additional functions. Read more »
> iScroll
The overflow:scroll for mobile webkit. Project started because webkit for iPhone does not provide a native way to scroll content inside a fixed size (width/height) div. So basically it was impossible to have a fixed header/footer and a scrolling central area. Until now. Read more »
> 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. Read more »