

JQuery Mobile Alpha 1 Released - sant0sk1
http://jquerymobile.com/2010/10/jquery-mobile-alpha-1-released/

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adriand
This is outstanding! The UI is beautiful and for an alpha release things seem
quite polished - then again, I was checking it on an iPad, which is probably
easy to develop for.

I really like the focus on wide compatibility and progressive enhancement, but
mainly I like that it seems that coding with this framework will still feel
like regular, mobile web development, using technologies familiar to web
developers.

As opposed to a whole new framework, we get to use jQuery and jQuery UI, which
many of us have grown to rely on. The prospect of using this to develop
amazing mobile technologies is incredibly exciting.

Thanks for all the hard work. I'm looking forward to subsequent releases but I
plan on starting to build something now!

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jordanlev
This looks great! I'm curious why they chose to use the "data-role" attribute
on divs to denote page structure, like this: <div data-role="page"> <div data-
role="header">...</div> <div data-role="content">...</div> <div data-
role="footer">...</div> </div>

instead of using the html5 elements already designated for those purposes
(since they're using html5 anyway): <section> <header>...</header>
<article>...</article> <footer>...</footer> </section>

(see the "NEW SEMANTIC ELEMENTS IN HTML5" section of
<http://diveintohtml5.org/semantics.html> )

~~~
jeresig
This was due to the fact that we're targeting a lot of platforms - many of
which may not be able to support those elements. For the first alpha we wanted
to pick something that would absolutely work - we can absolutely re-examine
using those elements, though.

~~~
todd-parker
I just added this as an issue in the tracker - thanks:
<http://github.com/jquery/jquery-mobile/issues/issue/209>

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8ig8
Very impressive on my iPad. Love that the form toggles slide.

One annoyance is a strange page 'flash' when using the Back button. The
transition appears to flash a view of the previous page. But, hey, it's alpha.
(Edit: I'm referring to the Back button provided by jQuery in the header of
the page, not the Back button on Mobile Safari.)

Many thanks for the work on this.

~~~
jeresig
Yeah - we've noticed the 'flash' as well - we suspect that it has to do with
the CSS transitions but we're still looking in to it (and it only appears to
happen on some platforms, but not others, making it all the more frustrating).

~~~
petervandijck
I've noticed the Flash as well, on iPad Safari.

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newman314
Switch Theme functionality is broken on webOS. More testing now.

Edit: (Here are more things that are broken in quick testing)

* The back button jumps you back to the webos starting page

* Transitions and dialogs are very jerky. Stuff like slideup ends up just flashing/flickring with no actual visible transition.

* Animations unfortunately feel very Apple/iPhoneish (not a criticism, just an observation). Comparatively, the Jo framework seems to be more aware of each device platform's UI quirks.

Understanding that this is still brand new and looking forward to the
improvements. Hopefully, you are in touch with the Palm dev team to address
some of the issues you are encountering.

(not an employee, just a user).

~~~
JoelSutherland
I'm on webOS overclocked to 800mhz and things are pretty smooth. This has been
my experience overall since overclocking. More than the experience being x%
faster, its more like the bar has been cleared that makes things feel fast.

That said, I'm also experiencing a number issues -- a good number of the form
elements just don't work.

Overall I'm still really impressed and excited!

~~~
jeresig
Can you file a bug on the form elements? (Specifically which one(s) you are
seeing the issue on) It'll help us to pinpoint the general area in which
problems are happening - thanks! <http://github.com/jquery/jquery-
mobile/issues>

~~~
JoelSutherland
If there is a better way to submit these, let me know:
<http://github.com/jquery/jquery-mobile/issues/issue/194>

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WesleyJohnson
Impressive. I'm not the best tester and I haven't dug too far into each
feature, but a couple of things I came across:

The toggle control doesn't want to switch back to ON fully. If you tap it from
the ON position, it happily switches to OFF. Tapping it again, however, makes
it act like a slider control and it refuses to switch back fully. Using it
like a slider and dragging it back to ON just forces it back to OFF
completely.

On the initial load of the slider control, I drug it to a position (say 78)
and the clicked the text box to see if I could edit it directly. I was able
too, but the number switched back to 0 instead of staying at 68. After
entering a new number, playing with the slider again and going back to the
text entry, it retained its value. Exiting the page and going back in to
repeat the process produced a similar bug, but this time the textbox was empty
and had a placeholder of "input".

On one occasion, I had a weird navigation experience: Form Elements > Clicked
Slider > Went to Slider > Clicked Back > Went to Form Elements > Clicked on
Checkboxes > Went to Checkboxes > Clicked Back > Went back to Slider??

On the FORM Example page that has all the different form elements on one page,
clicking on nearly _any_ element that brings up the soft keyboard causes the
display to scroll, however it doesn't scroll into the right position and the
element you're modifying is no longer visible. Exiting the soft keyboard
doesn't consistently scroll your view back to the correct location.

This was all on an HTC (Droid) Incredible, Stock Android 2.2, Default Browser.

That's all I've got so far. Still really impressed and looking forward to
playing with this some more!

~~~
todd-parker
Glas you like the direction of the framework. Thanks for all the detailed
feedback, we need to hear about all the issues on each platform (they're all
quirky) help us improve by logging each at: <http://github.com/jquery/jquery-
mobile/issues>

The toggle switch was working perfectly until Friday, we had a bit of a
regression on that one.

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armandososa
This is fairly impressive, I'm eager to try it out. Now, I'm surely
nitpicking, but isn't the name a bit misleading?

You know, jQuery (not mobile) is not a UI framework, maybe 'jQuery UI Mobile'
would be a better name.

Just saying.

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karanbhangui
Awesome job. I've been eagerly awaiting the arrival of this since it was
announced. I have spent the morning porting our app from using our internal
mobile framework to jQuery Mobile.

First thoughts, this is really really well done. Each page is taking next to
no time to change.

Secondly, is anyone noticing crashes on chromium (ubuntu)? The browser seems
to crash every few minutes..

Edit: also noticed a major part of the header doc missing:
<http://github.com/jquery/jquery-mobile/issues/issue/197>

~~~
todd-parker
Crashing may be a memory issue. As you click around,the framework loads the
new page with Ajax and adds it to the DOM. We haven't yet implemented a system
to only hold X pages in the DOM and dump older ones to keep things tidy. So if
you click around, the page will eventually get pretty large.

For now, you can add a rel="external" to links. This tells the framework to do
a full page reload and will give you a fresh start. Might make sense to add
this to certain links to ensure that the DOM is cleaned up periodically.

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ranza
This is really great! Works perfectly and fast on my iphone. I wonder if it'll
be possible to modify a current existing desktop version into a mobile version
using this, if I reach the site from a phone.

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annon
Is this not using hardware acceleration on the iPhone? Even on iPhone 4, the
transitions are extremely choppy.

~~~
todd-parker
We're using CSS transforms that are supposed to be hardware accelerated but we
have a lot of optimization to do to improve the smoothness of transitions.

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sgt
Looks great on my desktop browser (Google Chrome).

However, I tried on my Android 2.2 phone (HTC Hero) and the graphics are
sometimes a bit jagged or pixelated looking, and the scrolling is also quite
slow and not smooth at all. That probably has to do with the phone, seeing
that HTC Hero is a slow phone, despite its 500-something MHz clock rate. I
also think it's got to due with the browser being un-optimized.

~~~
todd-parker
We're going to be doing a lot of optimization to improve performance on
devices with less horsepower. We've been using a Google G1 as our low-end
Android device for testing and see similar issues - slow scrolling, lockups,
etc. because of the slow processors and limited memory.

Some of the rendering issues may be that the browser doesn't anti-alias
elements with border-radius or cleanly re-size graphics. CSS gradients can be
a bit expensive to render too. We'll look into that, but please log any
specific issues on the Git tracker for us. <http://github.com/jquery/jquery-
mobile/issues>

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wildmXranat
Testing it out on Android 1.5/ Motorola Backflip, looks good so far.

1\. Found that I need to check off 'Auto-fit page' - Format web pages to fit
the screen in Browser settings. Without that, the elements would extend far
off to the right of the screen.

2\. Flip-switch and Slider form elements have issues with long presses. If I
try to touch-drag them, browser asks whether I want to 'copy/share page' the
text.

3\. On Form Gallery, testing the selection box that allows me to choose 'Your
state', when the choices show up, it's pretty much impossible to drag up or
down. The click registers almost every time I try to touch-drag.

<http://jquerymobile.com/demos/1.0a1/multipage-template.html>

located on page [http://jquerymobile.com/demos/1.0a1/#docs/pages/docs-
pages.h...](http://jquerymobile.com/demos/1.0a1/#docs/pages/docs-pages.html)

~~~
jeresig
Thanks for the note about Auto-fit - will look into that. Also that demo page
should be fixed now.

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dshah
This is awesome! Thanks, John.

One thing that I find a bit unfriendly is that on an iPhone, every switch to a
new page briefly shows the URL bar at the top. Other than that, everything
seemed to work for me.

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auxbuss
Doesn't work on my HTC Wildfire running 2.1.

Demo page loads okay, and I can switch theme, although it's a bit flaky.
However, none of the buttons go to their linked page, it just sits there on
the original form. the buttons glow green to acknowledge they've been touched.

Looks great, though, and I'm off to try and run it with phonegap.

Edit: I raised a bug against this <http://github.com/jquery/jquery-
mobile/issues/issue/195>

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hntomcat
also testing on webOS .. hoping for a webos theme and back gesture support
(along with support for hiding the back button on pages). i'm ready to test on
webOS and to contribute back.

~~~
jeresig
So we're not planning on doing a webOS theme (or a iOS theme or a Blackberry
theme) as we wish to create something of a unified experience across the
platforms - although if you wish to contribute one, we'll absolutely accept
it.

Unfortunately it's impossible to hide the back button from a web page on
webOS. There are a number of limitations of the platform that are impossible
to work around.

~~~
hntomcat
>Unfortunately it's impossible to hide the back button from a >web page on
webOS. There are a number of limitations of the >platform that are impossible
to work around.

i was talking about the back button at the top-left location .. that is an
iPhone only feature (webos uses the back-gesture while android has the
hardware-back-button). i'm looking forward to test jquery mobile together with
phonegap on webOS.

~~~
jeresig
Ah, gotchya - yeah, that's totally a reasonable thing to assume. We'll work on
that! And thanks for the testing.

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nicw
There is quite a demand for a lightweight Phonegap app that calls on remote
pages, but frameworks like JQTouch don't handle remote injection of pages
(breaks navigation, tapping,etc).

I hope to see JQM support this without a lot of fiddling. It would be killer
to have an app that was essentially PhoneGap + JQM UI + loading of JQM-
compliant pages. No XML request, parsing, mapping to UI elements needed.

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pierrefar
From a G1, Android 1.6: It's very slow. Multi-second UI hangs and then the UI
becomes responsive but nothing has happened with the selection I made.

~~~
jeresig
Hmm - do you have any more details regarding where the hangs happened? We were
testing against a G1 w/ 1.6, as well and didn't see issues like that. If you
could take a moment to file a quick bug report we would appreciate it:
<http://github.com/jquery/jquery-mobile/issues>

~~~
pierrefar
Sure thing: <http://github.com/jquery/jquery-mobile/issues/issue/193>

~~~
jeresig
Excellent - thank you!

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sunkencity
Awesome work! Looks really great. Been looking forward to this a lot. Read
through the documentation now, and will port mobile web app to this in the
upcoming week, just gotta read through the source and plan a little.

I'm not yet seeing anything for special tablet layout stuff, I had expected it
to jump between tablet and phone mode with media queries. Well off to read the
source.

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DevX101
If this really enables web programmers to make functional phone apps as it
seems to do, I predict two things:

1) More useful apps will be out on the market with an influx of new
developers. "The best will get better"

2) The amount of money earned by your average app (already pretty low) will
continue to decrease as developer supply grows.

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aktxyz
1\. just flipping great

2\. this is a dead link Developing jQuery Mobile form
<http://forum.jquery.com/developing-jquery-mobile>

3\. did not see a link to download the demo files

4\. did I saw awesome!

~~~
jeresig
2\. Fixed! Thanks for the catch :) 3\. Good point - for now you can grab a
download from Github: <http://github.com/jquery/jquery-mobile/archives/master>

That'll have everything in it - including the demos.

~~~
aktxyz
Thanks - downloaded already.

Any google maps examples on the way?

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CWIZO
This page does not work on BB OS 5.2 (Bold 9000):
<http://jquerymobile.com/demos/1.0a1/>

It display's, but nothing happens if you click on a item. Also the 'hover'
animations lag and flash multiple times.

~~~
jeresig
The fact that it's displaying is a huge step up from where we were just
recently. (BlackBerry 5, and especially 4 can be really rough. We'll
definitely look in to this, it's one of tr platforms we want to get working
for 1.0 final.

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jonursenbach
It's too bad they didn't include anything to get around the positioning issues
when on a mobile browser and zoomed in.

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ntoshev
Looks great, but wouldn't it make sense to support Kindle's WebKit-based
experimental browser too?

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BonoboBoner
I guess the Sencha Touch guys are up for some reeaaally good competition.

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jcfrei
running more or less smoothly on the android. if jquery and html 5 keep
getting better in terms of ux then coding a native iOS or Android app might
someday become unnecessary.

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ig0rskee
Great news for the mobile web. Thanks, team JQuery!

