Position Absolute goes mobile, and a small introduction to jQtouch

What a better way of testing the jQtouch beta that by creating a mobile version of Position Absolute. You can test it out with safari at this address, or just tap position-absolute.com in your iPhone.

What can I say, I am stunned at the work here, jQtouch should really be your framework for creating small mobile websites (assuming you want to support only mobile webkit, so iPhone and Android based phone).

Perfect for list and text pages

It is not surprising that if there is something this framework does well, its animation on the iPhone. Webkit integrated lot’s of animation goodies, and jQtouch make the best out of it. You add a specific class for each type of transition and it will automatically animate the transition between your 2 pages.

Simple AJAX

Ajax calls were made as painless as possible, you link to your next page in the href link, “et voila” it will consider it automatically as an AJAX call. A small warning, I had a strange bug where some calls went nowhere, the transport was just not returning anything. It seems webkit mobile or jQuery was the problem here.

I had to resort to a little trick, I created pages in my mobile folder that would link to the content needed in wordpress by using this little php script:

$news= file_get_contents('http://www.position-absolute.com/mobile-news/');
echo $news;

Not perfect, but effective.

A nice little touch, on the iPhone you can add an icon to your homepage as a bookmark, if you were to create a small web based app, you could create a nice icon and loading screen that would feel like a real app.

Conclusion, it rocks!

If you are thinking of doing a mobile web app for webkit based phone, you should definitely try this out. You get all your basic CSS layout and javascript interaction. It just create 70% of what you would have to figure out yourself.