Mobile HTML5

Launch: Basecamp Mobile Eventually we came to the conclusion...

Wed, 02 Feb 2011 16:08:46 -0500

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.

staff: The newly optimized Tumblr web view for iPhone and...

Thu, 27 Jan 2011 18:14:29 -0500

staff:

The newly optimized Tumblr web view for iPhone and Android

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

Mobile Users prefer web apps over native apps?

Wed, 03 Nov 2010 15:16:54 -0400

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.

How we use mobile JavaScript in Freckle

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 11:57:54 -0400

How we use mobile JavaScript in Freckle:

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

Android 2.2 Browser Geolocation gotcha

Sat, 09 Oct 2010 12:46:03 -0400

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!

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

Fri, 08 Oct 2010 21:52:09 -0400

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:

senchainc: HTML5 Sencha Touch App vs. native iPhone App side by...

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 18:23:19 -0400

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.

An implausibly illustrated introduction to HTML5 Web Workers

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 20:20:49 -0400

An implausibly illustrated introduction to HTML5 Web Workers

jQuery Mobile

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 20:18:44 -0400

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.

WhitherApps

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 19:37:53 -0400

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.

11% of Web Traffic Worldwide is Now Mobile

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 14:29:55 -0400

mobileanalytics:

Mobile traffic to sites designed for the desktop Web have increased over the last 6 months from 8.3% to 11%, a 32% increase.

Will Mobile Web Apps Eventually Replace Native Apps?

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 19:51:51 -0400

Will Mobile Web Apps Eventually Replace Native Apps?

The preference of marketing over technical reasons signifies a...

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 19:22:00 -0400

The preference of marketing over technical reasons signifies a turn in the developer mindset. Developers no longer see programming fun as a sufficient reward in itself, but consider monetisation opportunities as a primary priority. It seems that, mobiledevelopers now have a sense of commercial pragmatism. As commented by one of our developer respondents, “Technical considerations are irrelevant. The choice of platform is always marketing-driven”.

- Mobile Developer Economics 2010: The migration of developer mindshare. Lots of interesting data and graphs here.

Will HTML5 be the demise of apps?

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 13:25:48 -0400

Will HTML5 be the demise of apps?

HTML5 and the Write-Once, Run Anywhere Dream

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 11:35:50 -0400

thegongshow:

Dan Kantor wrote a piece for Ajaxian about the “write once, run anywhere” dream and how HTML5 is a big step along that path.

Dan’s execution on Extension.fm feels like he reached two years into the future, and pulled an app back in time to show us all what the future of web development could be. In doing so, the tradeoff Dan made was to restrict compatibility to Chrome-only until other browsers become more standards-compliant.

The article is a great case study on the state of modern browsers, and you can see visions of the future peeking out. Read Dan’s piece first, and then revisit a true classic: Joel on Software’s “Strategy Letter IV” from September 2007. Go read the whole thing, but for people with no attention span, here’s the best part (long excerpt I know, but necessary — and funny):

Imagine, for example, that you’re Google with GMail, and you’re feeling rather smug. But then somebody you’ve never heard of, some bratty Y Combinator startup, maybe, is gaining ridiculous traction selling NewSDK, which combines a great portable programming language that compiles to JavaScript, and even better, a huge Ajaxy library that includes all kinds of clever interop features. Not just cut ‘n’ paste: cool mashup features like synchronization and single-point identity management (so you don’t have to tell Facebook and Twitter what you’re doing, you can just enter it in one place). And you laugh at them, for their NewSDK is a honking 232 megabytes … 232 megabytes! … of JavaScript, and it takes 76 seconds to load a page. And your app, GMail, doesn’t lose any customers.

But then, while you’re sitting on your googlechair in the googleplex sipping googleccinos and feeling smuggy smug smug smug, new versions of the browsers come out that support cached, compiled JavaScript. And suddenly NewSDK is really fast. And Paul Graham gives them another 6000 boxes of instant noodles to eat, so they stay in business another three years perfecting things.

And your programmers are like, jeez louise, GMail is huge, we can’t port GMail to this stupid NewSDK. We’d have to change every line of code. Heck it’d be a complete rewrite; the whole programming model is upside down and recursive and the portable programming language has more parentheses than even Google can buy. The last line of almost every function consists of a string of 3,296 right parentheses. You have to buy a special editor to count them.

And the NewSDK people ship a pretty decent word processor and a pretty decent email app and a killer Facebook/Twitter event publisher that synchronizes with everything, so people start using it.

Dan’s not building an SDK obviously, but he is building a killer app that is an example of what’s possible on the HTML5 platform with a few browser hooks from Chrome. Dan’s case study exemplifying the power of HTML5 is, for me, a clear look at the future of app development and a great example of where Joel’s NewSDK revolution will come from.

Funny enough, in 2007 Joel assumed that NewSDK would be a private company (like the Win32 API of the 90s) but in its seems that the outcome may be a open standards body, the W3C, with the HTML5 development largely led by Ian Hickson of Google. So, Joel nailed the evolution (jury’s still out technically, but I think Joel nailed it), but he missed on the players.

The world is getting more platform-fragmented, not less. Do...

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 16:41:36 -0400

The world is getting more platform-fragmented, not less. Do yourself a favor and write your next app in HTML5.

Why Porn and the iPad Are King for HTML5

Sat, 19 Jun 2010 15:51:50 -0400

Why Porn and the iPad Are King for HTML5

Sencha Touch

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 14:51:30 -0400

Sencha Touch:

Sencha Touch allows you to develop web apps that look and feel native on Apple iOS and Google Android touchscreen devices.

Why You May Not Need A Mobile App

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 16:25:40 -0400

Why You May Not Need A Mobile App

W3C: Mobile Web Application Best Practices

Sat, 12 Jun 2010 13:05:32 -0400

W3C: Mobile Web Application Best Practices