Archive for the ‘mobile’ Category
During 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.
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.
At first we have to thank the organizers, it was a great event. Especially the developer day (~100 people) was so loaded with energy, ideas and enthusiasm – wow that was huge! It took place in Barcelona Activa a business incubator, obviously well known throughout Barcelona, the Taxi driver knew right away where to go. The offices in there looked like you wanted to work there, the style of the house was so interesting that I even walked the entire floor once, because everything was so open and felt constructive. If you want to move your business to Barcelona try it out. And this was of course the perfect place for the mobile developer day, a young and constantly exploring group of people, pushing the limits and full of energy to move the mobile web forward. The parties afterwards had been as inspiring and great for getting to know people as they had been fun.
The conference day was just as interesting and though it was also a pretty cosy atmosphere (I would say about 250 people) one felt the difference to the day before, it was more on the business level but always mixed with the understanding for the young mobile industry it’s technical hurdles and the rough edges it still has, it was perfect too. Having tapas under the spanish sun was just as perfect as the content and the people there. The range of topics, no matter if in a panel or solo had been amazing and I am sure that everyone heard something interesting. For all the slides, and hopefully some videos watch the mobile2.0 site, pics are as usual on flickr.
The next mobile2.0 will probably be in San Francisco around October. See you there …

