The jQTouch Blog

jQTouch Roadmap

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 12:34:00 -0700

Hello all!

A while back, David shared an early version of jQTouch with me and I was blown away by it’s elegance and polish. Even in it’s early form, I could see that it was exactly what I was looking for: a drop-dead simple way for web designers and developers to create compelling mobile apps using their existing skills and tools.

I was so excited by jQTouch and Dave’s vision that I wrote two books on the topic, and I frequently demo jQTouch at conferences around the world. As you might imagine, when Dave asked if I’d be interested in becoming the official maintainer of jQTouch, I jumped at the chance.

There have been a lot of recent announcements surrounding jQTouch and I know that folks have lots of questions. Hopefully the following roadmap will answer these questions and give you a solid idea of what to expect from jQTouch in the future.

Cheers!

Jonathan Stark
@jonathanstark

jQTouch Will Remain MIT Licensed

There are three things you should know about jQTouch licensing:

jQTouch will remain MIT licensed
jQTouch will remain MIT licensed
jQTouch will remain MIT licensed

‘Nuff said.

Staying on jQuery

Some people have said they’d like to see the jQuery dependency removed from jQTouch to decrease the download size. The reasoning is that jQuery has a lot of code dedicated to legacy desktop browsers, and is therefore dead-weight on mobile devices.

We understand this reasoning, but John Resig and the jQuery team are doing a ton of testing and development for mobile browsers. We want jQTouch to benefit from this great work, even if it means that there is some jQuery code that never gets used by jQTouch. All things considered, we think the extra size is worth the cross-platform benefits.

Moving to GitHub

My first act as the maintainer of jQTouch will be to move the code over to GitHub. Baring unforeseen difficulties, I should have this done by the end of this week (Friday, June 25th 2010).

Fix Android

To date, jQTouch support for animations has been fairly borked on Android. My highest development priority is to clean up jQTouch for Android. This means fixing animations where possible, degrading gracefully where necessary, and adding support for optional platform specific theming.

Resolving Issues in Google Code

Dave tells me that there are quite a few tickets in the issue tracker on Google Code. Many are dupes, have fixes, have been fixed, or are just plain confusion. Over the next month or so I’m going to be combing through and resolving everything one way or another.

Small Screens

We have decided to keep jQTouch focused on small screen devices. Apps developed with jQTouch will certainly run fine on iPads and other tablet devices, but we aren’t going to automagically convert to a more tablet-friendly UI that takes advantage of the additional real estate. If you are in need of a JavaScript library that magically updates your UI for everything from small screens, to tablets, to desktops, check out Sencha Touch.

New Theming Engine

The entire theming engine of jQTouch will be rewritten using SASS. This will make it much easier for you to customize existing themes, or to create your own.

Dave Has Veto Power

Although I’ll be maintaining jQTouch on a daily basis, it’s still Dave’s baby. He will remain involved with the strategy and direction of jQTouch, and has ultimate veto power.

Thanks!

Thanks to everyone for their ongoing interest in jQTouch. Please keep your feedback coming, and expect lots exciting updates soon. I look forward to seeing your jQTouch apps!

2010 SXSW Interactive Session Ratings

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 12:11:56 -0700

2010 SXSW Interactive Session Ratings:

In at #1 — with a perfect 5/5 — is our new maintainer Jonathan Stark’s presentation, Hold the Cocoa: Building iPhone Apps w/ HTML, CSS & JavaScript..

And with that, dear friends, I hand the proverbial mic over to Jonathan.

jQTouch and Sencha Touch: Which is right for you?

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 11:56:42 -0700

jQTouch and Sencha Touch: Which is right for you?:

Recently I had the pleasure of announcing Sencha Touch, a standards-based mobile app framework which I helped create. As expected, this has raised some questions about jQTouch, a similar library I created last year. As covered before, jQTouch will remain separate, maintained, and free under the MIT license. This post helps distinguish the similarities and differences between the two libraries for the discerning mobile developer.

jQTouch is now a part of Sencha Labs

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 11:41:00 -0700

jQTouch is now a part of Sencha Labs:

The cat’s out of the bag! I was hoping to post something on this later this week, but word has already started spreading and I thought I’d take the opportunity to discuss, in greater detail, what this means. For those who don’t know, I’ve been working at Sencha (previously Ext JS) for about six months now, serving as creative director. We have tons of great things in the works, but for now I’d like to focus on what’s happening with jQTouch:

jQTouch will remain under an MIT open source license We are starting a new foundation at Sencha called Sencha Labs — a home for all of our open source initiatives including jQTouch and also Raphaël, a fantastic SVG library from my new coworker Dmitry Baranovskiy. Sencha’s core products, Ext JS and Ext GWT, will remain dual licensed, commercial and open source GPL.

jQTouch will remain jQTouch The jQTouch library will not be ported into Ext JS, nor will it start to use Ext as a base. It will still be based on jQuery and offer a super easy way to get an iPhone interface using just HTML and CSS.

Jonathan Stark will become the primary maintainer I regretfully admit I have been remiss in keeping up with jQTouch patches and updates. I’ve simply been overwhelmed with work. For those who don’t know, Jonathan Stark has been helping with jQTouch since the beginning — he is a good friend, a talented mobile developer/consultant, and a published author. Hiring Jonathan to spend a dedicated amount of time on jQTouch spells great things for the library, first and foremost looking at better Android support. I’ll refrain from going too deeply into detail, but rest assured, we have great plans for the library.

Lastly, I just want to mention that I will also not be abandoning jQTouch. It’s my baby, and Jonathan and I both look forward to planning its future, making it more powerful, and keeping in touch with you, the community.

I hope that helps keep everyone informed and please, if you have any other questions, just ask. Thanks!

Here are the slides from my recent presentation at the 2010 Bay...

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 13:30:00 -0700

Here are the slides from my recent presentation at the 2010 Bay Area jQuery conference. It was a blast to present there, I hope I can see a lot of the same people at TXJS. If you were at the presentation and enjoyed it, please throw me a review on SpeakerRate.

Edit: Also, here’s the Vimeo link (for iPhone/iPad) and the presentation on SlideShare.

jQuery Conference 2010

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 10:19:14 -0700

jQuery Conference 2010:

Just a quick note to let everyone know I’ll be speaking on jQTouch at the upcoming jQuery Conference in San Francisco Bay area. The talk will be on jQTouch, hopefully showing off some new goodies, and is going down day two, April 25, at 10:00 am. Tickets are available here.

jQTouch iCal

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 11:28:41 -0700

jQTouch iCal:

jQTouch iCal is an open source project which recreates iPhone’s iCal with jQTouch.

Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 10:41:42 -0700

Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript:

This has been out for some time, but I just realized I failed to properly pimp this book here. Jon is a fantastic mobile developer and designer, and this is a great overview for anyone looking to make iPhone apps with web technologies. It also just so happens to have a portion of the book dedicated to jQTouch development.

Smartupz provides web-based sales, productivity, and CRM...

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 09:55:07 -0700

Smartupz provides web-based sales, productivity, and CRM software.

Keypoint 2.0 is a beautiful presentation app for your iPhone,...

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 10:18:09 -0700

Keypoint 2.0 is a beautiful presentation app for your iPhone, now available on the App Store. Built with jQTouch.

jQTouch has won a Hive Award at SXSW for “Consumer...

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 11:20:34 -0700

jQTouch has won a Hive Award at SXSW for “Consumer Software” and is also listed as one of the “Top Five” overall projects. Thanks so much to the award organizers and to everyone who voted!

MosaLingua is a new app for learning Spanish (for French...

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 09:01:50 -0700

MosaLingua is a new app for learning Spanish (for French speakers). Built using jQTouch and PhoneGap (for the audio), MosaLingua is now available on the app store.

TextMate Bundle for jQTouch

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 12:05:36 -0800

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,...

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 12:12:23 -0800

Campaign Monitor, my favorite app for sending email campaigns, has released a gorgeous iPhone version of their app, built on jQTouch.

Railscasts

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 10:44:33 -0800

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..."

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 08:59:50 -0800

“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,...

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 09:42:56 -0800

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

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 10:52:53 -0800

John Gruber:

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

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:28:34 -0800

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

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:08:26 -0800

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.