JQuery Mobile Alpha 3 Released

http://jquerymobile.com/2011/02/jquery-mobile-alpha-3-released/

by taitems • 15 years ago

70 39 15 years ago

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...

taitems3• 15 years ago

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.

Toddparker7• 15 years ago

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.

evo_92• 15 years ago

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/

citricsquid• 15 years ago

Thanks for the link, tried it on my Nexus One and it looks great, it's very smooth!

(To clarify, all the processing "feels" smooth, not just the slidy bits, maybe responsive was a better word)

jsdalton• 15 years ago

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.

taitems3• 15 years ago

Hmm, I noticed number 3 mostly because I don't think that was a problem in the last release.

harisenbon2• 15 years ago

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.

va_coder• 15 years ago

I'm so glad jQuery came along. Everyone involved with jQuery rocks!

nitrogen2• 15 years ago

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

Toddparker7• 15 years ago

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.

nitrogen2• 15 years ago

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.

Keyframe2• 15 years ago

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

nasht2• 15 years ago

anybody try the demo page on desktop IE 7,8, 9? I'm traveling and won't be able to check for a while.

Toddparker7• 15 years ago

It won't work right now but will when we get the major JS bugs worked out. Stay tuned. All other desktop browsers will work right now.

Toddparker7• 15 years ago

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.

Keyframe2• 15 years ago

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!

marcalc• 15 years ago

NEAT!

marknadal• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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).

balakk• 15 years ago

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

shantanubala• 15 years ago

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.

taitems3• 15 years ago

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

johnbender• 15 years ago

Disclosure: I'm a contributor to jqm.

The most important differences I see in the mobile frameworks available now:

1. As mentioned in one of the other comments the device support is much more comprehensive. Symbian and BB 5 devices are being sold in large quantities every day and the project's goal to support them is an important one.

2. Jqm uses augmented semantic markup for layout, whereas sencha (afaik) uses templates from within Javascript.

3. The jquery community produces a lot of interest, a lot of contributions, and is generally very vibrant. I'm spending most of my time trying to keep up with the pull request back log (apologies to all those still waiting) which is an enormous asset to any oss project.

Hope that helps answer your question.

eli_s3• 15 years ago

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?

sequence72• 15 years ago

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_s3• 15 years ago

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.

Toddparker7• 15 years ago

The main focus of jQuery Mobile is NOT to be a competitor to native apps written in Objective C or even Sencha Touch. We aim to build touch-friendly UIs based on HTML5 for web apps and websites that are easy to build and work across a huge variety of platforms.

Sure, you can wrap a JQM site into an app with something like PhoneGap but I agree that a native app will always be more "native" and perfomant.

People never compare web apps built with jQuery UI to native applications created for desktop platforms, so it's a bit puzzling when we see developers try make comparisons between apps built with jQuery Mobile and Objective C. They are completely different tools, each with pros and cons.

The emphasis of the project is on embracing the web for mobile and I think that is the best way to judge the success of this framework.

eli_s3• 15 years ago

Thanks for the clarification Todd - this makes perfect sense.

I think what confuses the issue for many people, myself included, is that other frameworks(Sencha) are trying to recreate a pixel perfect iOS/Andriod UI/experience in HTML.

gwenfr• 15 years ago

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

Toddparker7• 15 years ago

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

JQuery Mobile Alpha 3 Released

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