Tap5
Long time, no see! I had a vacation in New York last week.
These custom made Converse shoes will be worn at my presentations from now on.
Today I’m starting my new job as a consultant at Consulence AB. I will be doing frontend development – Javascript, HTML5, CSS3, smartphone and tablet apps.
My skills, talks and workshops will be available through Consulence AB as of today.
At Tap5, we are making boardgames for touch devices. HP / Palm sent us a test device to port the games to the WebOS platform. Here’s our impressions so far.
- The notification system is awesome. So much better than the one on iPhone.
- The extra gesture area works excellent once you get to know it. After a few hours it starts feeling very natural. Still, it needs those few first hours of “steep” learning. Wondering if a persona like my mom would ever get it.
- How running apps are presented is awesome. The apps are zoomed-out to about half the screen size, and you flick your thumb left and right to switch inbetween them. If you want to terminate an app, just swipe it upwards and it will disappear. This might sound weird but I found it really elegant and intuitive.
- Resolution- and size-wise, it feels a bit retro with its 2.5″ 320×480 pixels display. I’d say though, that the screen hasn’t limited me that much.
- Setting up the device is both terrible and wonderful. Terrible: You NEED a SIM-card with GPRS access to be able to access their App Catalog (equiv. to Apple’s App Store). Wonderful: In just a few minutes, you’ve set up your Google and Facebook accounts. Automagically, you get everything set up for your. E-mail, contacts, calendar, even chat. This is the best account integration I’ve ever seen on a smartphone.
- The speed of the Pre 2 is not impressive. Most of the time it works fine, but in several situations you are reminded that this hardware is something like an iPhone 3 and not comparable to the latest strong smartphone hardware. For a dev phone this is all OK (it can even be an advantage!) but not to consumers. However, newer models are said to ship this summer.
When it comes to the actual porting, it couldn’t be easier. Since apps in WebOS are written in HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript, It Just Works[tm]. I am amazed. This is excellent news for Tap5 games!
Footnote: Microsoft recently announced that Windows 8 will use HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript as their default app architecture. Are webapps becoming the default platform now?
I got my hands on a Kindle 3 just recently. It’s a cute device which, to my surprise, packs a Mobile Webkit. This is good news! I decided to try out one of my HTML5/CSS3 experiments, “HTML5 Chess”.
It works! Not only does it render correctly, but it is also possible to navigate inbetween the different pieces using the little 5-way controller.
Community Day is a free one-day conference in Copenhagen. Around 400 people were attending the three-track conference.
I made an introductory talk on Phonegap. Earlier Phonegap presentations I’ve made were missing a personal story and hands-on example, so I incorporated that into this one. My HTML5 Color Clock (github) was the example code, check it out.
The slides are available on Slideshare: Phonegap introduction, Community Day 2011
The audience asked many questions, which is always a success measurement for me. I enjoyed several of the other talks and am looking forward to next year’s Community Day!
Tonight, we had the fourth ever Øresund Frontend Meetup. We didn’t have an agenda and we were only a handful of people, but it was “hyggeligt”. We had a little show and tell; Troels Lenda showed a demo with inline SVG combined with CSS3. I showed my 1K HTML5 Colour Clock with dynamic favicon, and a test I’ve been playing with using the “text blur” CSS3 hack.
For the next meetup, we agreed that we should come up with some concept that we can hack on together.
If you haven’t checked Øresund Frontend Meetup out, you should! It’s fun and free.
Yesterday, I made a presentation on HTML5, CSS3 and Phonegap at IT University of Copenhagen. The audience is attending the course “Dynamic Web Design” has a mixed experience with regards to web development – all know a bit of HTML, CSS and PHP, some also have experience from Java development or similar. During the presentation there were many questions, which I always appreciate. One question was in regards to the new Local Storage in HTML5: We are now enforced by law to inform the user about cookies, do the same rules apply about HTML5 databases?
On this topic I wanted to share this pun: EU “Cookies” Directive. Interactive guide to 25th May and what it means for you
Other useful links:
My slides on Phonegap and mobile strategy
On Wednesday February 16th, I did a presentation at Malmö Högskola on the topic of HTML5, CSS3 and Phonegap. Most attendees were students from the cool education “Media production and process design“. Some of these students are going to be doing some hands-on web development in the future, but I am sure that almost all are going to be involved in web and mobile web strategies at some point. I tried to find a good balance between tech talk and mobile web strategies like progressive enhancement, graceful degradation, feature and cost comparison between native apps and Phonegap apps. We ended the session with a discussion about copying code on the Internet and different open source licenses.
Slides: http://tap5.com/talks/phonegap/
Some links:
- Phonegap
- Phonegap Build Service (upload your website, it generates apps for you)
- MIT license – Can be used commercially without having to open source your own code
- GPL License – If your code uses it, your code also has to be licensed under GPL; “Free as in herpes”
- Creative Commons – an open license for media
I love the Creative Commons license, so it made me very happy to see that the new HTML5 logo suggested by the W3C is licensed under CC 3.0 – Attribution Unported. And so the poor remixes begin:
Just couldn’t help myself ;-)
/Björn
The Øresund Frontend Meetup today was a success. We had the most attendants ever. After my speech, some interesting discussions spawned. ØFM continues to impress me – our members are of very different background but with passion and much knowledge. If you’re living in the Øresund region and are into Frontend, be sure to check out our meetup page.
The speech is up here:
http://tap5.com/talks/phonegap/
PDF, not perfectly formatted but works: http://tap5.com/talks/phonegap/phonegap.pdf
And by the way. The markdown to slideshow generator I used is https://github.com/n1k0/landslide – and its slideshow part is based off of http://slides.html5rocks.com/
