PhotoSwipe, an Image Gallery for Mobiles Devices : HTML/CSS/JS-based image gallery specifically targeting mobile phones and tablets. I’ve just tested this on iPad 1, iPhone 4, BlackBerry PlayBook, Samsung Galaxy Tab, and HTC Aria. It works fine on all of them except the Aria (slow loading for some reason). … Read the rest here
Scrollability : Summarized nicely by its creator, Joe Hewitt: “Native scrolling for mobile web apps… or at least the closest thing to it!” Check the example on your iOS device: http://bit.ly/scrllabl The pinned header in the example reminds me of the newly updated mobile.twitter.com , which has some really nice features for a web-based app. … Read the rest here
Responsive Web Design or Separate Mobile Site? Eh. It Depends. : Josh Clark, author of Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps , summarizes and opines on many of the debates circulating the community right now regarding responsive design and mobile-optimized content. It’s a good read. … Read the rest here
I spent the last few days in the beautiful surroundings of Amsterdam for Mobilism . ‘Twas an excellent affair: a well-organised, focused single-track conference. It may have helped that Amsterdam itself was looking bloody gorgeous for the duration. All the talks were great but I was particularly happy to finally hear Bryan and Stephanie Rieger having so often favourited their presentations on Slideshare . … Read the rest here
Flux CSS3 Slider : Hardware-accelerated image transitions using CSS3, which, as described in the readme on GitHub , “improves performance on less powerful devices such as mobiles and tablets.” Indeed, this functions quite well on both my iPad and iPhone. … Read the rest here
I’m off to Amsterdam later this week for Mobilism , a design and development conference with a focus mobile devices . I won’t be giving a talk—there are far more qualified and talented people on the roster—but I will be moderating a panel. I love moderating panels . My panelists will be exemplars of that strange breed of supernerd, the browser maker. Specifically, the mobile browser maker. … Read the rest here
There was an episode of the SitePoint podcast a little back wherein Max Wheeler and Myles Eftos discussed many matters mobile, including a look at responsive design. A post of mine— Sea Change —came up in the conversation. Now admittedly this was before I published my clarification to make my point clearer, but I felt that my view was somewhat misrepresented on the show and I left a comment to that effect. I also said I’d be happy to come on the show and have a natter. Louis , the host of the show, was kind enough to take me up on the offer and we had a really good chat about responsive web design . … Read the rest here
The next talk here at An Event Apart in Boston is one I’ve really, really, really been looking forward to: it’s a presentation by my hero Ethan Marcotte . I’ll try to liveblog it here… The talk is called The Responsive Web Designer’s Workflow but Ethan begins by talking about his grandmother. She was born in 1910 and she’s still in great shape. This past Christmas she gave Ethan a gift of three battered and worn books that were her father’s diaries from the 1880s. They’re beautiful… Read the rest here
Next up at An Event Apart in Boston is Luke Wroblewski . Let’s see if I can liveblog just some his awesomeness. Luke begins with some audience interactivity. We’ve all got to stand up. … Read the rest here
Hiring: Mobile App Developer at msnbc.com : True story: I almost accepted a job at msnbc.com several years ago — after having turned down one at Apple — merely because I was so impressed by the team’s culture and innovative thinking. Here’s your chance to work on their startup-like Labs team to help shape the way news is presented online. … Read the rest here
The Real Lesson of Cisco’s Billion-Dollar Flip Debacle : Michael Mace, partly refuting the assumption all of us made after yesterday’s “RIP Flip” announcement : Most online analysis of the announcement doesn’t really explain what happened. The consensus is that Flip was doomed by competition with smartphones, but that says more about the mindset of the tech media than it does about Cisco’s actual decisions. I think the reality is that Cisco just doesn’t know how to manage a consumer business…. Cisco is an outstanding company, and an excellent place to work. But it screams respectable enterprise hardware supplier. To someone from a funky consumer company, going there would feel like having your heart ripped out and replaced with a brick… Read the rest here
If you look at my profile page on Huffduffer , this is what you’ll see: my details, what I’ve huffduffed, links to subscribe to my podcast and my tag cloud. That’s the core information for that page, preceded by a header with site navigation and followed by a footer with some additional links. Because I’ve provided a URL with my details, there’s some extra information displayed in the sidebar: my other profiles on the web, as determined by Google’s Social Graph API , MP3s recommended by Last.fm , my latest updates on Twitter . It’s a similar situation if you look at a piece of audio I’ve huffduffed . The core information is: all the details about the audio (title, description, tags), who else has huffduffed this, possibly-related items and links to share and embed the audio. In addition, because I’ve used a machine tag — book:author=cory doctorow —the sidebar contains: related articles from The Guardian, sales information from The New York Times, books on Amazon. … Read the rest here
When I met up with Malarkey right before An Event Apart in Seattle he told me about a quick bit of guerrilla testing he had been doing. He popped into a store selling Windows Phone 7 devices and started surfing the web. Specifically, he started looking at sites using responsive design like Jon ’s and Colly ’s. Most of the sites he looked at displayed the desktop layout instead of adapting to the smaller dimensions of the screen. That’s because the rendering engine for Windows Phone 7—some bastard hybrid of IE 7 and IE6—doesn’t support media queries. So if you’re using media queries to undo width and float declarations, the media queries won’t be executed… Read the rest here
Chromeography : “In praise of the chrome logos and lettering affixed to vintage automobiles and electric appliances.” The archives are a wealth of inspiration. Curated by Stephen Coles . … Read the rest here
Paul Irish , Divya Manian and Shi Chuan launched Mobile Boilerplate recently—a mobile companion site to HTML5 Boilerplate . There’s some good stuff in there but I was a little surprised to see that the meta viewport element included values for minimum-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0, user-scalable=no : <meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, target-densitydpi=160dpi, minimum-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0, user-scalable=no”> Setting user-scalable=no is pretty much the same as setting minimum-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0 . In any case, I’m not keen on it . Like Roger , I don’t think we should take away the user’s right to pinch and zoom to make content larger. That’s why my usual viewport declaration is: <meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1″> Yes, I know that most native apps don’t allow you to zoom but I see no reason to replicate that failing on the web… Read the rest here
I swear there’s some kind of quantum entanglement going on between Ethan ’s brain and mine. Demonstrating spooky action at a distance, just as I was jotting down my half-assed caveat related to responsive design, he publishes a sharp and erudite explanation of what responsive design is and isn’t attempting to do. He uses fancy learnin’ words and everything: When I’m speaking or writing about responsive design, I try to underline something with great, big, Sharpie-esque strokes: responsive design is not about “designing for mobile.” But it’s not about “designing for the desktop,” either. Rather, it’s about adopting a more flexible, device-agnostic approach to designing for the web. Fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries are the tools we use to get a bit closer to that somewhat abstract-sounding philosophy. And honestly, a more unified, less fragmented approach resonates with my understanding of the web on a fairly profound level. … Read the rest here
I swear there’s some kind of quantum entanglement going on between Ethan ’s brain and mine. Demonstrating spooky action at a distance, just as I was jotting down my half-assed caveat related to responsive design, he publishes a sharp and erudite explanation of what responsive design is and isn’t attempting to do. He uses fancy learnin’ words and everything: When I’m speaking or writing about responsive design, I try to underline something with great, big, Sharpie-esque strokes: responsive design is not about “designing for mobile.” But it’s not about “designing for the desktop,” either. Rather, it’s about adopting a more flexible, device-agnostic approach to designing for the web. … Read the rest here
Jason Santa Maria Go to the source
If you think your site’s content doesn’t matter, then you are sorely mistaken. Granted, the argument for content strategy has always mystified me. Not because I think we can do without content strategy, we can’t, but I’m amazed that we still have to make the argument. Folks care very much about appearances; what their websites look like means the world to them. But why don’t they care just as much about what their sites are saying? … Read the rest here
Feedback Details in the Basecamp Mobile Experience : This write-up shows some smart thinking by the 37signals team in regards to Basecamp Mobile . If the mobile web is ever to compete against the Objective-C web , this is how mobile web experiences need to be created. … Read the rest here
Hiring: Mobile Web Developer at WillowTree Apps : Virginia-based WillowTree Apps has launched an impressive 70+ apps since 2008 for the iOS, Blackberry, Windows 7, and Android platforms. I was fairly impressed as I flipped through their portfolio. If you know HTML5/CSS3 inside and out, have a solid understanding of JavaScript, and have experience working with at least one high-level, server-side language, you’ll contribute to making their portfolio even more impressive. Position is in Charlottesville, and relocation assistance is offered for the right candidate. … Read the rest here