TextMate Bundle for jQTouch
Jonathan Stark has created a TextMate bundle for jQTouch. It’s an early release, but looks quite functional—there’s a video after the link. Download it and help improve it!
Campaign Monitor, my favorite app for sending email campaigns, has released a gorgeous iPhone version of their app, built on jQTouch.
Railscasts
This week’s Railscasts episode shows how to alter your site’s display on mobile and incorporates jQTouch.
"Today, things have changed. With support from tools like jQTouch, it’s shockingly easy to create apps that feel like they belong on the iPhone using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript."
O’Reilly Radar, Web developers can rule the iPad
Meet jQTouch is a new installment in the PeepCode Screencasts, made by Geoffrey Grosenbach, which offers an absolutely fantastic introduction to jQTouch. The screencast covers beginner level topics like structure and styling and also dives into some advanced Javascript/jQuery and Ajax. The episode costs $9 and is a little over an hour, with sample files included.
Scrolling on the iPhone
Showtime looked good when I first saw it a few weeks ago, and it looks even better today. It looks like a great native iPhone app. It just doesn’t feel like one, and scrolling is the main reason. I also believe that iPhone web app developers need to be careful about creating controls that look like native iPhone controls, but act different. Showtime uses On/Off toggle buttons that look just like the native ones, but the fake web ones can only be activated by tapping them. The real ones can be both tapped and slid. And my observations suggest most iPhone users slide them (including Phil Schiller in an on stage demo). If you have to tap them, better to use checkboxes, I say.
I agree, the scrolling is an issue. I’m going to investigate PastryKit to see how viable this hacked acceleration/fixed positioning is. The toggle is mostly laziness, however—this is certainly possible and I hope to implement in the next week or so. And yes, for those who are curious, this PastryKit research is taking precedence over the Tweetie throwdown, which I’ve been remiss through the moving chaos.
Reader Question: Turning Off Vertical Scrolling
Is there an easy way to disable vertical scrolling via jQTouch. I have an app that doesn’t require any vertical scrolling so I’d like to get rid of the rubberband effect when a user swipes the screen up or down vertically.
This is possible with some general iPhone programming, but do be careful (this will disable swipes as well…). Basically, you should be able to just use:
$('body').bind('touchmove', function(e){e.preventDefault()});
Reader Question: Press-and-hold on an image
Is there a way to support press-and-hold on an image? That would allow saving to iPhone’s Photos Camera Roll.
As you’ve noticed, jQTouch disables text and image selection by default in order to better imitate native apps. There’s a convenience class, however, to remedy this: Just add class="selectable" to the image you’re describing.
The jQTouch Mailing List
For those who haven’t seen, I’ve started a new Google Group dedicated to jQTouch. This is a great place to ask beginner questions, show off your latest app, or discuss mobile web technology in general.
Showtime is a beautiful, simple jQTouch app which keeps track of your favorite TV shows and lets you know when new episodes are available to watch.
