Design & Development
Consuming JSON services in Android apps
December 19, 2012, by weimenglee
Unless you are writing a Hello World Android application, chances are your application would need to connect to the outside world to fetch some data, such as live currency exchange rates, weather information, records from databases, etc. One of the easiest ways for your application to connect to the outside world is to use web services. For the past few years, XML web services have dominated the arena for web services, as XML was touted as the ubiquitous medium for data exchange. However, using XML as the medium for your data payload suffers from the following problems:... Read More
Lightweight accordions & sliders with jQuery Mobile
Mobile developers are commonly confronted with clients who want everything – all the content and features – on their PC site crammed into the mobile site, rather than going for a streamlined mobile site. That might sound like a recipe for bloated code and a poor user experience – neither of which is acceptable on a mobile device – but it needn’t be, as long as mobile developers emphasize ingenuity over excess functionality. That’s where jQuery accordion menus and sliders come in very useful and, if used cleverly, they can help keep the mobile experience lean and mean... Read More
A Guide to Using Pictograms in Mobile Applications
November 6, 2012, by casaise
A long-standing feature Developers inspecting the user agent profile of a modern handset like the Motorola XT682 ATRIX TV may be surprised to discover the following ImageCapable declaration which indicates whether a device can display images or not: Yes... Read More
Using HTML5 application cache in mobile Web apps
October 11, 2012, by AndreaMoretti
One of the most interesting features of HTML5 is support for application cache. Every Web browser has a built-in cache that stores recently visited Web pages. This means the same pages and assets will load faster the next time the browser returns. At every subsequent call, the browser checks the timestamp to determine whether to reload the assets from the server or serve the cached versions... Read More
Sense and sensor-bility: access mobile device sensors with JavaScript
Just as we humans call upon our senses to provide us with data about our environment, so smartphones and tablet devices use their own digital senses – touchscreen, geolocation, orientation, direction and motion – to provide interaction and to tailor applications and games to the user and their real-world surroundings... Read More
