

JQuery Mobile Alpha 3 Released - taitems
http://jquerymobile.com/2011/02/jquery-mobile-alpha-3-released/

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evo_9
Wow, this is really coming along nicely guys - well done!

I just tested it on my iphone and it's really looking excellent.

Direct link (to demo) for those that want to test it out on a mobile:
<http://jquerymobile.com/demos/1.0a3/>

~~~
jsdalton
It's better than the last round, but still has a bit of a ways to go on the
iphone.

For example, the behavior of clicking one of the slide menus is:

1\. The address bar pops down momentarily while the ajax call is made and then
disappears after half a second. 2\. The loading graphic overlay appears and
then disappears. 3\. The window pops you back to the top of the original page.
4\. The page slides over, and you're on the new page. 5\. The new page does a
quick half second "flash."

It's progress to be sure, but these little kinks are what need to be ironed
out before anyone should consider deploying it.

~~~
harisenbon
I actually just finished a web-based ipad demo for a client, and my choices
were jqTouch, JQueryMobile or Sencha.

While I love the html syntax for JqueryMobile (Sencha is a giant Javascript
function, which had a steep learning curve at first) I felt that the widgets
and display quality of jQueryMobile just didn't match that of Sencha.

Sencha's transitions felt faster, animations were smoother, and form items
felt more like native parts than in jQueryMobile.

I eventually went with sencha because it produced a better experience on a
tablet, but I think I would definitely like to give jQueryMobile a try on my
next smartphone project.

~~~
evo_9
Yeah I really hope jquery mobile can match the smoothness and fixed menu
support to be on par with Sencha.

That's definitely the main thing keeping me on the Sencha side for now too.

Considering how new this project is still, the progress is very encouraging
though.

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balakk
Nice. Can any one please highlight the differences between this and jqtouch?

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shantanubala
The main difference is in browser support: jQuery Mobile is on its way to
supporting Windows Mobile, Opera Mobile, and almost any new mobile browser
while jQtouch is only for Webkit. Also, jQuery Mobile works pretty well in
Google Chrome from my experience if you're inclined to use a mobile app on the
desktop for some reason, while jQtouch doesn't have animations on Google
Chrome.

EDIT: And it's officially supported, meaning it's here to stay.

~~~
taitems
In regards to your edit, jQTouch was acquired by Sencha and is now officially
supported (and maintained) as well.

~~~
harisenbon
Was it really? I find that interesting, since jQTouch is much closer to jQuery
Mobile in syntax than Sencha (which is a giant Javascript Object)

~~~
rayval
Yes there is a bifurcated development path. I prefer the HTML-friendly
approach (JQtouch) as opposed to the monolithic Javascript (Sencha Touch)

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aaronbrethorst
I was wondering what was going on, since the last missive was targeting a
final release in January[1]. I'm excited to see this, and especially excited
that we're going to see A-grade support for WinPhone 7 soon. Congrats!

[1] [http://jquerymobile.com/2010/11/jquery-mobile-
alpha-2-releas...](http://jquerymobile.com/2010/11/jquery-mobile-
alpha-2-released/)

~~~
taitems
I was browsing the support forums and the team seemed to be copping a lot of
(not undeserved) flak over their lack of communication to the public. In
response to this they have promised to be much more transparent and have also
set up a twitter account.

~~~
Toddparker
Yep, we're very active on our @jquerymobile twitter account since the team
gained access to it a week ago. We'll be posting code updates and soliciting
feedback so follow us. Sorry for the lack of communication over the past few
weeks, we've been heads down getting a3 out.

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marknadal
Nice, I love jQuery because it made DOM manipulation a breeze by abstracting
everything. But I am getting the feel that jQuery Mobile assumes "what" it is
that developers are creating, making it less abstracted and more narrow minded
(for instance, that we all want right to left iPod style page navigation). Or
perhaps not, I could just be wrong.

~~~
tlianza
jQuery Mobile is not a mobile version of jQuery - it's a UI library for mobile
devices. A better comparison would be jQuery Mobile to jQuery UI. Both
projects depend on jQuery proper, and both provide UI-widgets (they are
absolutely "narrower" than jQuery, as you say).

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nitrogen
Looks nice. The demo runs quite slow on my Galaxy S, though. Should I expect
it to be faster at this point?

~~~
Toddparker
What specifically is slow -- touch events, scrolling, transitions, etc? We're
working on bug improvements on all of these items so things will get faster,
lighter and more responsive as we go. Oh, and work on more platforms (Nokia,
Blackberry 5, Windows Phone 7). Feel free to log issues on the Git tracker.

~~~
nitrogen
Mostly the animated transitions. I get about 4 frames total for the entire
transition. Scrolling is also a little slow for the first few seconds after
loading a page, but it quickly reaches normal speed.

I'm not working on any mobile webapp projects right now, but if/when I do I'll
be sure to provide more detailed feedback on the issue tracker (if I encounter
issues at that time), and otherwise contribute back to the community.

At any rate, keep up the great work! I finally took a detailed look at jQuery
UI as a result of seeing this post and there's a very good chance I'll be
using it in the semi-near future.

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gwenfr
it has some bugs... the fixed-position header/footers randomly disappear on my
iphone 4 / ios 4.2. I'm sticking to 1.2!

~~~
Toddparker
They were much buggier in 1.2 so 1.3 is much more reliable but your mileage
may vary.

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Keyframe
demos don't work on wp7 though, page loads and is blank.

~~~
Toddparker
We're working on debugging WP7 now and will be pushing an update soon to make
things work much better. We use media query support to decide who should be
enhanced and WP7 doesn't support these so we need to add some code to let them
in. We just got our first device last week but things are already looking
good.

~~~
Keyframe
Great to hear that! Reportedly, there is a WP7 update due soon.. I didn't
expect this IE in current WP7 to work at all as good as it does (I think it's
7), we'll get IE9 I guess, with new update. Keep up the good work!

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marcalc
NEAT!

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eli_s
Great work, however it's far short of the quality of Sencha Touch.

I have to wonder what the point of mimicking native UI is.

I've just started learning Obj-C and iPhone dev and getting ones head around
basic UI functionality is at most 2-3 days worth of playing around. Is is
really worth sacrificing native performance and consistency for such marginal
gain?

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sequence7
Shocking as it may sound not all mobile devices are iOS, in fact most aren't.
jQuery mobile lets you target a huge number of devices. See the supported
browsers page for a list:

<http://jquerymobile.com/gbs/>

~~~
eli_s
Performance of these types frameworks on anything other than the beefiest
mobile hardware is woeful.

I get your point though... 1 click deployment to multiple devices is a great
feature.

~~~
sequence7
True, performance on older mobile hardware's not great, my old htc hero runs
the demos at a pretty glacial pace. But it wasn't so long ago that javascript
performance was apparently so poor that web apps would never catch on and
remember this is an alpha version so it's going to get quicker.

I do agree native apps are going to be more appropriate in a number of
situations though.

