John Cox

Blogs · @wyome

Tagged mobile · everything

matt.might.net

HOWTO: Native iPhone/iPad apps in JavaScript

This guide demonstrates how to build full-featured iOS apps using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS—complete with native-feeling interactions like gestures and touch events, offline caching, home screen icons, and splash screens. The author explains specific techniques for removing browser chrome, preventing unwanted scrolling and zooming behaviors, and styling elements to match iOS design conventions, then walks through bundling the web app as a native Objective-C app for App Store distribution. The post includes practical examples like a gesture-controlled graph navigator and a medical logging application that syncs with a backend database.

Permalink mobiletutorialios

www.elated.com

jQuery Mobile: What Can It Do for You?

This 2011-era tutorial walks through jQuery Mobile 1.0 alpha, showing how markup-driven pages, Ajax page loading, transitions, touch-friendly forms, list views, theming, and tap/swipe events let a developer build mobile-style web interfaces with little or no hand-written JavaScript. It is worth keeping as a practical, code-heavy primer on the framework's early feature set, and as a snapshot of an alpha release whose dialogs and event support were still rough, which the reader's later comments about broken events and changepage problems confirm.

Permalink programmingmobilejquery

woorkup.com

10 Useful Frameworks To Develop HTML-Based Webapps for Touch Devices – woorkup.com

This is a 2010-era roundup of JavaScript and HTML5 frameworks for building touch-based mobile web apps, covering Titanium, Sencha Touch, PhoneGap, Rhodes, iUI, iWebkit, XUI, jQPad and others, and closing by recommending jQuery Mobile as a single codebase that would run across all major smartphone platforms. Its value lies in that snapshot of the field at the moment before jQuery Mobile shipped, with each tool's scope and target platforms laid out side by side.

Permalink programmingmobiledevelopmentios

mobile.tutsplus.com

Introduction to Corona SDK: Easy Cross-Platform Development

Corona SDK is a cross-platform development framework that allows developers to write applications once in Lua and deploy to iOS and Android devices without needing Objective-C or C++. The framework provides native performance through OpenGL hardware acceleration, access to device features like GPS and accelerometer, and a shallow learning curve due to Lua's simplicity, though it has some limitations in supporting newer native SDK features like Push Notifications and iAds. The tutorial walks through setting up Corona, choosing a Lua editor, and building a simple "Hello World" application to demonstrate the basic workflow.

Permalink programmingmobiledevelopmenttutorial

Flipboard

www.w3.org

HTML Media Capture

This W3C working draft specifies how HTML forms can access a device's camera, microphone, and video recording capabilities through enhancements to the file input element, allowing users to capture media directly rather than only selecting existing files. The spec proposes adding a "capture" parameter to the accept attribute (e.g., `accept="image/*;capture=camera"`) that hints to the browser which capture mode to offer by default, and defines a MediaFile interface to handle the resulting media data. The document is still in early development with several aspects explicitly noted as needing further coordination with other working groups and community feedback.

Permalink mobiledevelopment

Mashable

5 Things to Consider When Designing Your Mobile App

This piece outlines five essential considerations for designing mobile applications: first deciding whether a native app or mobile website better suits your goals, then accounting for the specific contexts where users will engage with the app, designing scalable interfaces for varying screen sizes across devices, adhering to platform-specific UI conventions to ensure familiarity and consistency, and prioritizing touch-friendly design with accessible button placement and visual feedback. The guide emphasizes that mobile design differs fundamentally from web or desktop design, and successful apps require thoughtful decisions about these factors before and during development.

Permalink appsdesignmobiledevelopment

trentwalton.com

Non Hover | Trent Walton

Written in 2010, this piece argues that hover states—interactive elements triggered by mouse movement—are fundamentally incompatible with the rapidly expanding touchscreen market and should be eliminated from web design rather than adapted to work on both devices. The author contends that designers should prioritize "multi-touch first" approaches, avoiding hidden content and relying instead on visible action items, tap-to-reveal mechanics, or native app experiences, treating hover effects only as optional enhancements for desktop users.

Permalink mobilecss3

Sencha.com

jQT

net.tutsplus.com

The Easiest Way to Build your First iPhone App | Nettuts+

PhoneGap allows developers to build native iPhone apps using web technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) rather than Objective-C, by wrapping web code in an embedded Safari view and mapping native iPhone features like GPS and camera to JavaScript APIs. This tutorial demonstrates creating a mobile web app with native iPhone styling using the jQTouch framework, then compiling it into a distributable iTunes App Store application through PhoneGap and XCode. The example builds a simple app displaying a Tumblr feed with screen transitions, showing how minimal setup is needed to go from web app to native iPhone application ready for App Store submission.

Permalink mobiletutorialiosjquery

www.mandarindesign.com

www.mandarindesign.com