Dom
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Registered: 13th Sep 03
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I'm looking to expand a web application to include (partial) mobile support (initially iPhones but may include Android/Backberry) and wondering if anyone has had experience with using mobile frameworks? Any recommendations?
Tar
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ed
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Registered: 10th Sep 03
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jQuery Mobile is ok, it's a bit limited and the UI is slightly garish. It's based on jQuery (obvs) so it's nice and simple, but needs expansion/plugins to have more than basic functionality.
Sencha Touch is the shiz, but it's pretty complicated to get into. I didn't get very far with it as I've always done little mobile jobs which didn't need all the functionality so couldn't justify the time to learn it all.
Kendo UI Mobile is beautiful, gives you a native look over multiple platforms an is based on jQuery so it's pretty simple and familiar for most web devs. It's free in some circumstances but for most projects you'll have to pay for it. I've never managed to get a client to cough up for it though so not used it in anger yet.
I also came across this the other day - looks interesting: http://www.lungojs.com/
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ed
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One more I forgot about too, Bootstrap. Responsive layouts seem to be quite popular now - it does seem like a good idea to make full use of CSS3 media queries to serve the same content to all devices and let the device decide what it can display rather than trying to make that decision yourself using the UA string.
http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/
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Dom
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Registered: 13th Sep 03
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Much appreciated Ed.
Was looking at LungoJS last night actually, seemed to be pretty fluid and straight forward from the quick gander. The-M-Project and DHTMLX Touch are a few others i've seen that look decent.
As you say, Kendo looks brilliant But as always budget is tight so likewise, there's no way i'm going to be able to get the client to pay for it
I initially thought of Bootstrap but it lacks the features that a dedicated mobile framework offers.
By the way, have you rolled out any apps/sites built on mobile frameworks? Any tips/tricks you can offer?
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ed
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Registered: 10th Sep 03
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I've done one in the past using jQuery Mobile, NDA protected so can't say what it was and I don't think it's online anymore anyway. Main thing I learned from that one is to not use jQuery Mobile It's kind of featureless in comparison to other libraries available, but I guess some people like to have more flexibility when creating things. Saying that, this project was completed a year ago now so it may have improved.
I'm building a web-app at the moment for someone, they haven't sent me the designs over yet so I'm not too sure how I'm going to code the UI but it requires file uploads so I'm going to package up an iOS app for them as well as the web version. Will be writing something in my blog about all that at some stage, though it's covered by an NDA too so will have to be quite general.
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Dom
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Registered: 13th Sep 03
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Might give JQMobile a miss then
Although do you need a dedicated app for the uploads? Could you not use HTML5 uploading (ie: Uploadifive - supports HTML5/Flash/Silverlight/Form-data plus does chunking)?
Will keep an eye out for your blog post though
[Edited on 04-09-2012 by Dom]
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ed
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Negatory on iOS - access to the filesystem/image gallery is denied on pre-iOS 6 devices. The only way to do is is with a dedicated app. Typical Apple
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