jQuery Mobile Data Attributes

In testing out the newly released jQuery Mobile library, I'm left with strong but mixed feelings about it.

First, it's a surprisingly unique solution. The jQuery team is very good at simplifying hard problems, but in some ways you come to expect that the solutions will be quite similar. I expected a bunch of jQuery-type functions that would transform your markup into the mobile look and feel. I expected jQueryUI for mobile, and was ready to start moaning about how inflexible and unsemantic it was.

Instead, their solution is to add HTML syntax and automatically wire up all of the functionality for you. Not what I was expecting. You don't have to write a single line of JavaScript for the default functionality. This has got to be the easiest solution for porting HTML content to a device. Your "pages" can all live inside one HTML file or be loaded dynamically with AJAX. All the URL's get dynamically referenced to the main page and resolve correctly. And no handwritten JavaScript or CSS in sight.

A lot of this functionality comes through the use of custom data attributes in your HTML. In my perusing of the HTML5 features I have to admit: this one seemed fairly boring. So what if I can add custom attributes and my page still validates? Why should I care?

But the guys at jQuery Mobile have capitalized heavily on this notion. By using custom attributes quite liberally to alter the semantic meaning of lists, headers and anchors, they can automate all the behind the scenes JavaScript and CSS necessary to make it work.

It's a strange reversal of the web technology where the withering old HTML document is front and center again and the CSS and JavaScript hide in the back room, pulling on the invisible strings.

For a "Navigate to Text Content" site, this is a dead-simple solution. I think a 'Project Gutenberg' site is at the top of my list. Or maybe an RSS reader.
Some negatives that I see:

1. Building or altering UI components is going to be a pain.
2. Really only scales to iPhone-size devices. (They support iPad, but who uses full-width buttons on iPad?)
3. The UI is a tad bland. (Erring on the side of caution, I guess)
4. I'm undecided on all of those data-role tags.
5. It's new and strange. I don't like new things. I'm scared of it. What if it doesn't like me?

Anyway...

My real takeaway is not the tool itself, but understanding how it works and how I can incorporate those ideas into my own projects. There's a lot of smart people working on projects like this, and you really only get to know them by reading their code.

Browser Review: Arora

The Browser War is an ongoing battle with no obvious winners, although there is a seemingly never ending stream of competitors.

The big players at the moment seem to be converging on their basic feature set while edging out their opponents in a certain area. Firefox has extensibility, Chrome has speed, Safari has stability, Opera has security, and IE has users (yes, IE bashing is mandatory in any browser debate!).

Beyond these, there is an interesting subset of purpose built browsers: Flock does social browsing in an interesting way. Sea Monkey includes many tools specific to developers and advanced users. Dillo boasts an extremely small footprint and fast loading.

Arora

But the new browser I've been testing lately is Arora. It is still a very immature version, but I think some of the features are really well done. First of all, it looks really nice on Mac. This may seem like a silly comment, but most apps that have been developed with a "cross-platform" toolkit come out looking like cheap knockoffs with cartoon icons and ugly screen proportions. Even Chrome, with it's oh-so-clever tab bar and Firefox with it's monster icons. This is fine for Linux, which doesn't have clearly established UI conventions, but for Mac development: don't break the rules unless you have good reason.

In this sense, Arora does it right. Not that they use Mac icons, but they are minimalistic and clear, and the layout doesn't add visual clutter or break established conventions. It doesn't shout "Look at this groundbreaking layout!", and that's a good thing as far as I'm concerned. It let's you focus on the task at hand.

I downloaded the .10.1 version which had some serious bugs on the Mac: many SSL errors, no two-finger scrolling. But this is an alpha version so I gave it the benefit of the doubt. I installed the Qt SDK and built .10.2 from source and now it works great. Not really for the faint of heart, so hopefully there will be a Mac binary update soon.

Give me the Keyboard!

The first shock was that it was very keyboard friendly. This is like a +5 million points for me. The way it works is that when you're on a site, if you press the Command key all the links get letter popups beside them. You press the key and it goes to the link. How cool is that! Generally, all the links get letters based on the first letter in the link name, so if a site's top bar has links named "Home", "Reviews" and "Downloads", these will be mapped to the keys H, R and D. All other keyboard shortcuts work as you would expect on a Mac.

These guys have done their homework when it comes to keyboard accessibility. The only exception is using F11 for fullscreen, my macbook has F11 mapped to Volume-DN and fn-F11 mapped to Expose. Not a big deal, considering the wealth of things that they got right, even compared to the big browsers. For example, Cmd-L puts the cursor in the Location bar and Cmd-K jumps to the Search bar. In Safari, you have to Cmd-L to the location and then tab to the search for keyboard only input. Yes, it might be a small thing, but it's good attention to detail.

So far, there's really nothing keeping me from using this as my main browser, which is an amazing feat considering how lightweight and early in development it is. Page loading is fast and application loading is the fastest of any full-featured browser I've used. It renders with qt-webkit, which was a bit rocky to begin with, but has come a long way in a short time.

And you gotta love the polar bear on the globe icon!

Applescript Mindbender

This is a crazy hack!!!

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20060425140531375

How to have the same file contain both a shell script and a compiled AppleScript

% /usr/bin/osacompile -o shebang.scpt
on run argv
    argv
end run
^D

% chmod +x shebang.scpt
% echo \#\!'/usr/bin/osascript' > shebang.scpt
% ./shebang.scpt a b c
a, b, c

This puts a compiled applescript in the resource fork and a shell script in the data fork... mind exploded!

Bluebrain Project

This is not directly related to my studies at the moment, but I will be keeping my eye on this project.

Bluebrain | Year One from Couple 3 Films on Vimeo.

Although much more lofty and ambitions than what I would like to be involved in (for now, anyway!), the project is interesting in it's medical focus of the benefits of brain modeling. I have noticed that when the focus is computation, the immediate payoffs are better (ie. interesting algorithms, programming structures), but we always lose sight of the bigger pictures and run off into premature optimization. The pocket calculator does computation faster than any brain, but it will never get beyond its programming.