I got to the party tardy with H5B, having just started using it a few weeks ago, but I love this project. It’s hard to deny that it’s a great, easy to use, starting point for HTML5 projects — chock full of best practices. Although it’s still Ant-based, the build system is pretty lovely as well. If you haven’t already tried it out, version 2 should add in enough to push you over the edge.
A couple of the guys at the office got together and came up with this short wishlist with all of the things we’d love to see happen in the world of HTML5, CSS3, and other web standards. Favorites include #6, #7, and #9.
“I think there’s actually a very good reason why we should, in fact, embrace the term “HTML5” as an overarching buzzword for this latest round of web standards and specifications. Our industry has proven on several occasions that we don’t get excited about new, interesting, and useful technologies and concepts until such a buzzword is in place.”
My newest post on the Sencha blog covering the wonders of SASS and Compass. Includes a full getting started guide and covers some of the techniques we used in developing the themes for Sencha Touch.
PPK in February:
The iPhone has become an obsession. If we don’t pay attention, we’ll have a mobile web that only works on the iPhone. And then we’ll have the real mobile web that wasn’t made by us and doesn’t give a shit about web standards and best practices.
Sure, the iPhone doesn’t have the biggest marketshare among devices, but it does have over 50% of estimated worldwide smartphone traffic. I believe this is because the iPhone’s Mobile Safari delivers an ideal browsing experience. This experience, though, is provided by WebKit, an open source project which several groups contribute to. The WebKit project has led the way in innovating mobile development, with HTML5 support, CSS3 extensions, and touch events. From the project’s goals:
The project’s primary focus is content deployed on the World Wide Web, using standards-based technologies such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript and the DOM. However, we also want to make it possible to embed WebKit in other applications, and to use it as a general-purpose display and interaction engine.
The best part of WebKit is that it’s open source and not limited to the iPhone. WebKit is also found in a few Apple devices not listed in AdMob’s report (as they’re not smartphones) like the iPad and iPod Touch. WebKit also powers the browser in Google’s Android. According to AdMob’s April report, there are over 52 million active users of Mobile WebKit, when looking at current iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, and Android devices.
PPK seems equally dismissive of Android, only mentioning it once in his article:
Oh, and don’t bring up Android. Yes, it’s an excellent system, and yes, it could have a bright future ahead of it, but right now it doesn’t amount to anything in the global market.
PPK’s article was posted in February, but contrasts with AdMob’s stats from the month before. In January, Android represented 21% of worldwide traffic — Second only to iPhone OS, which had 50%. Together, that’s 71% of worldwide smartphone requests. In the US, this number went up to 86%. Currently, Android is shipping in over 160,000 phones a day, up from 60,000 in February. To me, this amounts to something big.
Android’s not alone, either. WebKit is also found in HP’s webOS (formerly Palm’s) and is expected to be implemented in a variety of touch-enabled tablet devices like the iPad. Even RIM is diligently working on their WebKit browser, which is already being demoed.
PPK takes an admirable position: One web, accessible to all. After all, isn’t that what web standards are all about? In an ideal world, sure, we would deliver a fantastic, top-of-the-line experience to all of our mobile users — but, let’s face it, this is near impossible. If we’re to program our mobile sites and web apps as progressive enhancements, derived from the lowest common denominator, they will never be on par with the immersive, native experiences that these new devices have to offer.
Sure, it could be considered irresponsible to say, program your site to work on the iPhone and call yourself a mobile expert. But if you can quickly develop a amazing experience tailored for mobile WebKit, why shouldn’t you? In addition to providing an immensely better interface for over 90% of your users, you’re learning the skills of tomorrow’s smartphones and tablets.
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.
It is my honor to present Sencha Touch, a brand new HTML5/CSS3 app framework for touch devices. I have secretly been toiling away on this for the past few months, and let me tell you: it is an incredible relief to finally be able to discuss it.
Sencha Touch represents a new era of mobile web app development. Firstly, the number of visual components we have included is, as one friend put it, “incredibly ambitious.” We have tabs, carousels, forms, lists, buttons, toolbars, maps, overlays, and more — all with myriad options for manipulating their design and UX. And, most importantly, all built entirely with web standards like HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript.
On top of the actual components, we have a robust data package (inspired by Ext JS), that is essential for developing content-based applications. We provide simple ways to get data via Ajax, JSONP, or YQL, and let you easily bind that data to components like lists or render it into HTML templates. I built a data-driven app for Kiva, a fantastic non-profit micro-loan organization, in under a week.
And lastly, there’s the style/theme layer. This has been my real brainchild within the project. I fear it may take some time for developers to really see how much power is in there, and I hope to explain a bit of it in some forthcoming posts and screencasts. At its core, the theming/CSS system is based on Sass, an abstraction layer for CSS that adds things like variables and functions. To give you some idea of its potential, check out the source of the Android theme we’re offering, which is written in under 30 lines of code (check out a preview here, in a WebKit browser). My other favorite part of the styling layer is that it is resolution independent. Through a combination of CSS3 and relative sizing, we have managed to make our UI elements (like buttons and toolbars) the same physical size across devices with different resolutions/DPIs. It’s somewhat hard to describe how unique this is, but I think people will see the benefits of this very soon.
It’s been a great ride, working on this over the past few months, and I’m looking forward to seeing this library grow into the best mobile app framework around, web or native. For the jQTouch fans and followers out there, worry not — development is about to ramp up there as well, with help from my good friend Jonathan Stark, which we’ll be posting about tomorrow. For 9-bits follower in general, I apologize for the lack of posts lately (hopefully this helps explain) and promise I’ll be ramping up news posts again soon. And lastly, to everyone who has helped make this possible, including our early private testers and the rest of the Sencha Team, thank you, thank you, thank you.
If you have any questions about Sencha Touch, jQTouch, or mobile web apps in general, feel free to send them here and I’ll try to answer them here on the blog. Now go download the thing and start building apps!
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