Mobile HTML5

Feb 2

Launch: Basecamp Mobile

Eventually we came to the conclusion that we should stick with what we’re good at: web apps. We know the technologies well, we have a great development environment and workflow, we can control the release cycle, and everyone at 37signals can do the work. It’s what we already do, just on a smaller screen. We all loved our smaller screens so we were eager to dive in. Plus, since WebKit-based browsers were making their way to the webOS and Blackberry platforms too, our single web-app would eventually run on just about every popular smartphone platform.

Eventually we came to the conclusion that we should stick with what we’re good at: web apps. We know the technologies well, we have a great development environment and workflow, we can control the release cycle, and everyone at 37signals can do the work. It’s what we already do, just on a smaller screen. We all loved our smaller screens so we were eager to dive in. Plus, since WebKit-based browsers were making their way to the webOS and Blackberry platforms too, our single web-app would eventually run on just about every popular smartphone platform.

Jan 27

staff:

The newly optimized Tumblr web view for iPhone and Android

Also check out our apps available for iPhone, Android, and Blackberry.

Nov 3

Mobile Users prefer web apps over native apps?

mobilefocus:

Adobe have released their recent survey results on “Users Preference for using a mobile browser vs native app for accessing select types of mobile contents”.

As a result, most mobile users preferred to use mobile browsers accessing virtually all mobile contents, especially on e-commerce/online shopping, news, and product reviews categories.

Games, music and social media were the only categories in which users preferred native apps.

Oct 18

How we use mobile JavaScript in Freckle

Nice overview of simple ways to make your HTML5 mobile app better and easier to use.

Oct 9

Android 2.2 Browser Geolocation gotcha

I’ve been using fortysquires as my exclusive Foursquare app for many months now. I used it on iPhone and, for the last three or so months, on Android (Droid X). Everything was working great until my Droid X was updated to Android 2.2 (FroYo) and the GPS code stopped working.

It wasn’t just on fortysquires, either. It was on many sites that rely on geolocation. In fact, one of the only sites that did work was mobile.twitter.com (for a while, even Google’s mobile homepage didn’t show my location, but it seems they’ve recently fixed it).

In any case, searching for the root cause was mostly fruitless, so through a long amount of trial-and-error, I found the bug. It’s very simple, but not obvious.

It’s all about enableHighAccuracy

Previously, the relevant portion of my code looked something like this (simplified):

navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(handleSuccess, errorCallback);

However, in order to make Android 2.2 work (and, perhaps some updates of Android 2.1), you must add the enableHighAccuracy option:

navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(handleSuccess, errorCallback, { enableHighAccuracy: true });

In all honesty, I’m not sure what prompted the change by Android developers, but whatever it is, this is the solution. For a 29 character change, this took me about 10 hours of experimentation and debugging to figure out.

In case you’re wondering, according to the W3C spec, enableHighAccuracy means:

The enableHighAccuracy attribute provides a hint that the application would like to receive the best possible results. This may result in slower response times or increased power consumption. The user might also deny this capability, or the device might not be able to provide more accurate results than if the flag wasn’t specified. The intended purpose of this attribute is to allow applications to inform the implementation that they do not require high accuracy geolocation fixes and, therefore, the implementation can avoid using geolocation providers that consume a significant amount of power (e.g. GPS). This is especially useful for applications running on battery-powered devices, such as mobile phones.

I hope this helps you as you look for the solution to this bug!

Oct 8

37Signals: Here’s what we’ve learned about doing UI for mobile web apps with WebKit

Lately, we’ve been exploring ways to offer web apps that perform like native apps on mobile devices. For this short sprint we targeted mobile WebKit browsers—especially the default browsers on iOS and Android—because of their widespread use and excellent support for HTML5 and CSS3.

Here are a few things we’ve learned along the way:

Sep 8

senchainc:

HTML5 Sencha Touch App vs. native iPhone App side by side (HD) (via touchNOC)

Sencha Touch beta 4 (.94) was released today — Read the release notes or download it and try it for yourself.

Aug 16

An implausibly illustrated introduction to HTML5 Web Workers

jQuery Mobile

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.

Aug 9

WhitherApps

WhitherApps is a bandwagon-busting experiment. I believe there are far too many native client apps which could have been far better written as mobile web apps. What we’re going to try and do is take a few examples, apply a little reverse-engineering, and rewrite them, warts and all, with web technologies.