February 26th, 2010During a very intense week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and a lot of very interesting meetings, discussions and talks, one incident surprisingly stuck out. At one of the evening events, I randomly met the folks behind http://www.yourappshop.com, a platform which allows you to distribute iPhone applications through other means than the official Apple app store – you don’t need a jailbroken iPhone as you need when using alternative app stores such as Cydia. But before I explain in more detail what they are doing lets have a look at the current app store hype.
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February 15th, 2010Lately we have been quite active around a mobile app, which you can find in multiple app stores for multiple platforms. The app runs on iPhone, Android, Palm’s WebOS, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Nokia S60, Vodafone 360 phones and we are still adding to the list. But the most interesting fact is: it’s all the same code, just one and the same app. For making it work on all the platforms we just had to wrap, build, deploy and package it using the right combination of tools for the right platform. By adding a bit of UI sugar (mostly CSS) the app looks native and can reach a much wider audience for a much lower cost than ever possible before.
January 25th, 2010During the Oredev speakers dinner last November, I was having an interesting discussion about the car industry and how Google in one swipe mangled up the turn-to-turn navigation market. During this discussion and other interesting conversations at the following JsConf, it it became more and more clear that we (web developers) should be able to write applications for instance for cars, write applications for phones we can plug into cars, and write those applications using web technologies – meaning JavaScript, HTML and CSS.
January 21st, 2010It’s been quite some time since the last dojo.beer() event took place in Germany and a lot of things have changed within the Dojo Toolkit with the release of 1.4.0. This is why we would like to invite everyone who is interested in Dojo, or who would like to talk to other Dojo developers, to the next dojo.beer() event in Munich:
| Date: | Friday, 12.02.2010 |
| Time: | 3:00 PM – 11:00 PM GMT+1 |
| Seats: | about 80 |
| Language: | English |
| Location: |
EineWeltHaus Schwanthalerstr. 80 80336 München http://www.einewelthaus.de |
You can signup here:
January 9th, 2010In a lot of programming languages, I would even say in most programming languages, the following looks awkward and does surely not work. One of those languages is C. But JavaScript is sometimes a miracle and like a box of jewelery, ready to be discovered. And if you are new to it, it is loaded with surprises. Read on to get a tiny glimpse into some of them. JavaScript has some really interesting things waiting.
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December 2nd, 2009Porting a W3C widget to webOS should not take a lot of effort, should it? webOS is built on top of web technologies, and in my mind the web is tagged “#universal”. But unfortunately, webOS isn’t universal. It’s different. I’m going to show you which differences you need to be aware of when doing cross-platform development and your application is supposed to run on webOS. Read the rest of this entry »
November 27th, 2009
In a recent project a client asked for boxes with rounded corners and filled with a gradient; within an application targeted at smartphones.
On mobile devices it is important to keep things simple, for instance to keep the number of DOM nodes low. That rules out using additional elements for the corners. On the other hand, many mobile devices are featuring recent versions of web rendering engines. Dive into CSS 3.
Modern web development techniques offer a lot of possibilities to render boxes with rounded corners: e.g. border-radius, border-image, or SVG used as background. In this post I’m going to explore the support for them across different devices and runtime environments. You can skip to the results table if all you want is a quick overview.
As stated above, I want to achieve a box with rounded corners and a gradient that reaches from top to bottom, scaling to the height of the box. The example might be simple, but it is representing a common design goal.
November 10th, 2009