jbail

I then tried Safari on my iPhone. Again, no Buy Now button. I had to use a desktop browser to even see the Buy Now button, then I had the exact same experience. I had the phone in my cart and then it magically disappeared when I tried to check out.

All in all, this was an awful shopping experience. The phone was for my wife, but not having any sort timeline for when they will again be available, I told her to just go to Verizon and buy the best phone they have in stock. Google will lose a sale in this...which is too bad. It looks like a cool phone, but they can't manage a supply chain or a webstore apparently. As a Google shareholder, that scares me a little bit.

I write very nice, commented JavaScript that employs consistent whitespace and indentation and validates in JSLint all day long. That's just how I do it and I'm way faster than the coworkers of mine who code things quick and dirty.

You reach a certain level of expertise and your code will just naturally have these qualities. It will be both beautiful and will be developed quickly. Senior talent gets this. Junior talent doesn't.

This was a thought provoking article though. The main takeaway is that "getting things done" is the most important skill a programmer can have which I completely agree with. For the sake of other developer's sanity, clean code is so important too. Ugly, sloppy code takes longer to read, more effort to maintain and is frankly demoralizing and tiresome to work with. Clean code for me is probably right underneath getting things done on a skills ranking. Ideally, good developers would have both...and my experience shows that good developers do.

But you also use normal resolution images, right?

Many (if not all) low resolution Android devices aren't able to scale images down by using background-size. Since it doesn't work, the UI gets blown out by huge images that haven't been scaled.

Just curious on that implementation detail since dual sized images for low to high res screens is something I deal with in my day to day mobile web work.

Nice work though. The mobile site looks really good.

If you made an "app browser" that allowed better searching (type the first letter and the app appears --- tap to open it), sorting (like bookmark folders) and easy navigation between apps, you'd be presenting me a much better experience than the current process of finding and switching between apps on your phone.

That said, I still think pure mobile web could be the future. Why couldn't Apple allow mobile web apps to be sold in the app store? It's an icon that opens a web page. It could be as simple as that.

Let's take it a step further. Imagine that when you download this new type of mobile web app, Apple calls a JavaScript API that reads the HTML manifest in the 'index' file and loads the resources in the background. Apple shows the downloading bar over the app icon while this happens, just like downloading an app today. When you click it, everything is loaded and ready to rock.

Mobile web apps like Facebook prove that you can build a non-trivial app that runs in a web browser and have the experience be so good that people don't even care about the native app version (at least everyone I know just uses Facebook right from their mobile web browser).

A good domain name is still valuable. This is more true especially as more access to phone hardware gets opened up to JavaScript APIs right from the browser. You just can't beat making a change to your app on your server and having all your users get new versions the next time they visit. It's way better than waiting weeks for Apple to review and approve your changes.

Seeing Jillian Michael's face when I'm buying a domain or setting up DNS records for a client is pretty much the last thing I want to see.

I guess you could say SOPA was the last straw. Transferring 47 domains cost a pretty penny, but it feels really good to leave that circus behind.

I went with Namecheap, primarily because I've heard good things about them and this blog post made it easy. I like how simple and snappy their web site is. Much quicker and easier to use than Godaddy...and no Jillian Michaels staring me down.

I don't know akavlie personally, but he's been on HN for a long time. I think he's a rational person based on his discourse here.

When I do mobile web, I use percentages for UI layout elements (like headers, footers, sidebars, etc), and pixels for text, buttons, etc.

This approach definitely results in a slightly different display on different screen resolutions, but the overall effect is that it looks good and is usable no matter where you view it. For me, this is the approach I've found that "just works", so I keep using it.

That said, I don't think I've ever seen centimeters and inches used in any CSS I've come across, but I'd love to see some examples that are well done.

I think in the not-to-distant-future, especially as mobile browsing overtakes desktop browsing, its going to be a prerequisite that plugins/widgets work on both screens. As people evaluate whether or not to use a plugin, this will quickly become a deciding factor.

Again, not a critique of this plugin. Just a thought I had while looking at this and being kind of sad that I couldn't really experience the demos on my phone.

I'm aware of Freshdesk because they made a retaliation website in response to something stupid that somebody said on Twitter. It doesn't inspire confidence in their ability to provide help desk software. They are spending time worrying about what other people think of them and say about them instead of just rocking out their product. I'm not impressed by that at all.

What is the nature of their skills (what areas of expertise and what level of expertise)?

How long will you have to work for the acquiring company?

Discussions of what is the best platform are futile. The answer to that debate is always: it depends.

For example, looking at mobile web page transitions, jQuery Mobile is way behind the competition in terms of optimization. The slide transitions in Sencha Touch 2 are way smoother than jQuery Mobile. I recently had lunch with one of the Sencha Touch developers and learned that they optimized this by not using CSS3 transitions at all and instead use a different approach with much better results.

To pick the best mobile web framework for you, you really need to evaluate what you're looking to get out of it. Then go with the one that has optimized those things which you care about most.

I've used both jQuery Mobile and Sench Touch and ultimately I decided I value a small framework codebase and full control of the framework most. Thus, I use a handrolled solution and it's been a great decision for me.

Asking for $25,000 on Kickstarter doesn't compute with me. If you were really scrappy, you'd already be doing it.

I've worked with jQuery Mobile and I need to disagree. jQuery Mobile doesn't add much to mobile web app development. It's just a UI toolkit that offers boilerplate styling and page navigation/transitions.

I'm not trying to take away from the usefulness of jQuery Mobile for some people, but it doesn't bring a lot of excitement to mobile web.

You touched on the real watershed event in mobile web development though --- which will be hardware accelerated WebGL and hardware accelerated CSS3 animations. When that happens, it'll be a whole new world for mobile web apps.

Mobile web frameworks get you an immediate boost in developer productivity, but down the road, those gains are given back as you try to achieve reasonable performance, which to some extent is a fools errand because you just have so much library code bogging down the browser/webview.

Other parts of a mobile web app, like CSS3 transitions, will perform as well as the browser/phone lets them. Using CSS3 for transitions and animations is definitely "the right way", but as of now, these are pretty clunky on most phones.

As far as JavaScript frameworks go, you could use Sencha or jQuery Mobile or one of the other few dozen frameworks out there --- or you could roll your own.

I've been doing mobile web development for about a year now. I've done both PhoneGap and over-the-air mobile web/native apps (with embedded webviews that load HTML/CSS/JS from the web when requested). Both types of apps accepted by Apple and in the Appstore as well as in the Android Market. I would recommend rolling your own and not trying to imitate the look of native apps. One of the strengths of using HTML5 is that you can create a custom look and feel that doesn't look like every other app out there.

Since you mentioned Sencha and jQuery Mobile, here's what I think having used both:

Using Sencha is nothing at all like using HTML5. You don't even write HTML or CSS. You write JavaScript that uses Sencha's classes/methods. The look and feel very much tries to mimic native and they do a pretty good job at it...except that most widgets look like they were ripped from an iPhone, which is disorienting for users on Android. That said, you get good performance and a boatload of widgets/ui controls out of the box. The price for this is a large, multi-hundred kb framework and a commercial license.

jQuery Mobile doesn't really try to look native and it really doesn't "feel" native either. jQuery has it's own ui controls that more or less look identical on iPhone or Android. With jQuery Mobile, you do write HTML and have a more transparent view of that as well as of the CSS. But, you have to write HTML the "jQuery Mobile way" to utilize the UI built into the framework. You don't get as many widgets and ui-controls as you do in Sencha and overall, the look and feel is not of the same caliber either. But, it's smaller than Sencha, has your standard MIT license and is more easily modified.

Neither is perfect and both have pluses and minuses. If you know some HTML, CSS and JavaScript, you will absolutely get better performance and and a smoother look and feel by rolling your own light JavaScript for your app that does just what it needs to do.

If you'd like to see an example app I built using PhoneGap and handrolled HTML/JavaScript/CSS, you can download Easy Baby from the Android Market. It's free. You'll find a link to it on my website: http://newbabysleep.com

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for telecommuting and did a 100% telecommuting gig for 3 years straight, but there's no way to get a days work done in 1 hour.

...and you're totally right about jQuery Mobile causing suckage. I used it for a couple features and I'm now ripping it out in favor of a little handrolled solution I built. I even replaced the jQuery core library with XUI because it's even smaller has most of the goodies I use 99% of the time.

For everything XUI doesn't have, I really like XUI.extends in its simplicity better than the jQuery plugin architecture. Super easy to add whatever else you need.

Performance is night and day better now.

Also, I might go a couple font sizes larger. It's readable, but small on my phone.

All in all though, it's pretty nice. It's a good example of what mobile web can do and showcases the power of client side development when you have an API to support it.