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Showing posts from 2013

New Year 2014 wishes

M ay every day of the new year glow with good cheer and happiness for you and your family. Spatial Unlimited wishes all its readers a a very " Happy New Year " Enjoy the Holiday Season...

Jquery Mobile 1.3.1 presentation

    We have been taking a look at several Jquery Mobile examples here and the the Jquery Mobile version that we were using was 1.2.0. The next stable version was 1.3.1 and included a few new features. I will be covering all the features of Jquery Mobile 1.3.1 in the presentation here and also other topics like: Design constraints that we need to consider while developing our next mobile website or application Different ways in which we can effectively debug our mobile website or web application from our desktop or using remote-debugging on the iOS and Android platforms.     Take a look at the presentation below and you can redirect any queries to me here or tweet me @shreerangp or drop me a line on G+  +Shreerang Patwardhan . Hope you enjoy the presentation and also all the code samples that I have included as part of the presentation.     The next stable release for Jquery Mobile would be 1.4.x. Once the Jquery Mobile team makes a release, I will put together a presentati

Tribute to Sachin Tendulkar

    Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar - The greatest batsman of this generation is playing his 200th test match starting today. This test match that is being played between India and West Indies at the "master blaster"'s home ground at the Wankhede Cricket Stadium in Mumbai is the final match that he will be playing. The legend of cricket, the little master, the master blaster, the GOD of Cricket retires after this test match at Wankhede.     A billion hearts are praying for the great Sachin Tendulkar and everybody is paying their tribute to this great ambassador of the game of Cricket. Sachin has borne the burden of the entire nation throughout his entire career and has been the hope for a million cricket fans in India. I still remember, when I was a kid, I used to turn off the television when Sachin would be dismissed, knowing for sure that the Indian cricket team would loose the match after his dismissal. It would not be wrong, if I were to say that every Indian has wan

Diwali Wishes 2013

Wishing all the readers of Spatial Unlimited a very Happy Diwali and a Prosperous New Year!

Jquery Mobile Toolbars - Header and Footer

    In Jquery Mobile there are 2 standard types of toolbars: Header and Footer. The header is typically the first element inside a mobile web page and the footer is typically the last. Both these toolbars usually contain buttons, links and text. In this post today, we will take a look at these 2 toolbars in Jquery Mobile. Lets's take a look at the code below.     As you can see in the HTML above, the structure clearly shows that we have the header as the first element of the Jquery Mobile page and the footer as the last element of the page. The title text is normally an H1 heading element but it's possible to use any heading level (H1-H6) to allow for semantic flexibility. For example, a page containing multiple mobile "pages" may use a H1 element on the home "page" and a H2 element on the secondary pages. All heading levels are styled identically by default to maintain visual consistency as you can see in the above example, we have used H3.     Now,

SASS - Nesting the CSS

    To begin with SASS we need Ruby to be installed on our machine. To set up Ruby and SASS on your machine refer to the following steps.     If you’re using OS X, you’ll already have Ruby installed. Windows users can install Ruby via Windows installer , and Linux users can install it via their package manager. Once you have Ruby installed, you can install Sass by running: gem install sass     To translate your Sass file into a CSS file, run sass --watch style.scss:style.css     Now whenever you change style.scss, Sass will automatically update style.css with the changes. Later on when you have several Sass files, you can also watch an entire directory: sass --watch stylesheets/sass:stylesheets/compiled     We don't need to do so many things to get up and running. We just need our good old friend jsFiddle. We will take a look at the various features of SASS today onward. Let's discuss the most basic and an important feature today - Nesting. In all I will be cove

SASS: Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets - An Introduction

    I had some free time today, and decided to explore into SASS, which I had planned on doing for a long time. SASS is really cool and it really is simple styling with a lot of attitude. SASS really makes CSS so much fun. I loved it and am putting up a few posts to talk about the various features of SASS.     SASS is an extension of CSS3, adding nested rules, variables, mixins, selector inheritance and much more. The SASS CSS is required to be compiled before it is transformed into standard CSS using a command line tool or a web-framework plugin. Let's not worry about this for now.     SASS CSS can be written using 2 types of syntaxes. The most popularly used syntax is known as "SCSS", rightly named " Sassy CSS" and is a superset of CSS3's syntax. This means that every CSS3 stylesheet is valid SCSS as well. The second syntax is an older one known as the "indented syntax" or just SASS. This syntax is for people who do not love brackets and

Jquery Mobile Buttons

    Buttons - an integral part of a form is styled really well and consistently using the Jquery Mobile framework. We will discuss and take a look at the different buttons, their styling and usage in today's post. Buttons are coded with standard HTML anchor and input elements, then enhanced by Jquery Mobile to make them more attractive and touch friendly for mobile usage. Let's discuss this and more in the example that follows.     You must have already observed that the styling for the first 5 buttons is the same, even though the HTML markup for each is different. The first one is created using an anchor tag. The next one using a button  element and further using input elements of type button , submit and reset . To create a button out of the anchor element, you need to include a data attribute data-role="button" with the anchor element. The framework now styles the anchor element as a button. Now the question arises as to when to use a anchor based button and

Jquery Mobile Form - Select Menus Part II

    In part II of this tutorial on creating select menus using Jquery Mobile, we will discuss some customization techniques like overriding the default native OS select menu or disabling an option or creating a multi-select select box. It is advisable that you take a look at part I of this tutorial where we have discussed the basics of the select menu. In case you have decided to proceed with this part, then we are ready to take a look at the code that follows.     In the example code above, you will observe 2 different selects. We will be discussing the following data attributes and HTML5 properties that will enhance the select menus further. 1. data-native-menu="false" 2. data-placeholder="true" 3. disabled 4. multiple     As seen in the first implementation, by adding the data attribute data-native-menu="false" we can simply override the native OS menu control and display a pop-up containing the options in a listview. If there are a large

Jquery Mobile Form - Select Menus Part I

    Today we will take a look at the select boxes styling and usage using Jquery Mobile. Select menus has a little more explanation and examples than other controls and so I am dividing the select menus tutorial into 2 parts. In the first part, we will take a look at the basics of the Jquery Mobile select menus and in the second part we will take a look at the more complex examples involving the select menus.     The Jquery Mobile select menu is based on the native HTML select element, which is styled and modified to suite the Jquery Mobile framework's style. By default, the framework leverages the native OS options menu to use with the custom select button.  When the button is clicked, the native OS menu will open. When a value is selected and the menu closes, the custom button's text is updated to match the selected value. The framework also offers the possibility of having custom (non-native) select menus; which we will discuss in part 2 of this tutorial. Refer to the s

Jquery Mobile Form - Checkboxes

    Checkboxes - popularly used in forms for multi-option selection, pose a problem in the mobile web world! The checkboxes being so small as they are, reduce the touch area and it becomes really difficult for selection. Jquery Mobile styles these checkboxes in such a way that they become touch friendly and gel with their overall framework design. Jquery Mobile styles the label for the  checkboxes  so that they are larger and clickable. A custom set of icons representing the  checkboxes  is added to provide additional visual feedback.     The  checkboxes  can be used singularly or in a vertical group or can be even grouped horizontally. These  checkboxes  can be used along with data-mini="true" too, which renders the  checkboxes  in a smaller size. We will take a look at all this in the example that follows.     In the first implementation you will see, 3 singular  checkboxes  which are not attached to each other like in the second implementation. These 2 implem

Jquery Mobile Form - Radio buttons

    Radio buttons - popularly used in forms for single option selection, pose a problem in the mobile web world! The radio buttons being so small as they are, reduce the touch area and it becomes really difficult for selection. Jquery Mobile styles these radio buttons in such a way that they become touch friendly and gel with their overall framework design. Jquery Mobile styles the label for the radio buttons so that they are larger and clickable. A custom set of icons to represent the radio button is added to provide additional visual feedback.     The radio buttons can be used singularly or in a vertical group or can be even grouped horizontally. These radio buttons can be used along with data-mini="true" too, which renders the radio buttons in a smaller size. We will take a look at all this in the example that follows.     In the first implementation you will see, 3 singular radio buttons which are not attached to each other like in the second implementation. T

Jquery Mobile Form - Flip toggle switch control

    A binary flip switch is a very common UI element in the mobile web world and was made popular by our very own iOS. This flip switch is used mostly for binary on/off or true/false data inputs. To create a flip switch or a toggle switch, start with a select with data-attribute="slider" and two options. Jquery Mobile would style this select as a regular flip switch with capsule corners and a a circular handle which can be either dragged from one end to the other or tap either sides of the switch.     The flip toggle switch is available in 2 flavors/sizes - regular and mini. Adding a data attribute data-mini="true" to the input tag renders a smaller sized flip switch. Let's take a look at the code sample below to understand the working in a better way.     In the code above, you will see 4 different implementations of the flip switch. The first one is a regular flip switch with the label and the toggle button one below the other. The second implementa

Jquery Mobile Form - Slider control

    Input field of type range is newly introduced in HTML5 and is very well styled. The style is further enhanced when using the Jquery Mobile framework and we will see how this can be done in today's post. Jquery Mobile styles the range input type with capsule-corners and adds a circular handle to the slider.   The input's value is used to configure the starting position of the handle and the value is populated in the text input. Specify the min and max attribute values to set the slider's range. If you want to constrain input to specific increments, add the step attribute.   As you drag the slider's handle, the framework will update the native input's value (and vice-versa) so they are always in sync; this ensures that the value is submitted with the form.     The range input elements are available in 2 flavors/sizes - regular and mini. Adding a data attribute data-mini="true" to the input tag renders a smaller sized input element. Let's take a

Jquery Mobile - Customizing the search box

    Customizing the Jquery Mobile default styles is often required to match the design visuals provided by your designer and approved by your client. Such is the case with the Jquery Mobile search box as well. The designers often use customized icons for the default search box icons. In the example that follows, we will take a look at how this done and we will use custom icons for the search box in place of the default icons.     As seen in the example above, in the CSS, we need to use the !important  keyword to override the default styles of the Jquery Mobile class.     Customizing the search box or any other element in Jquery mobile is pretty simple. Hope you have followed the post and followed how to customize the Jquery Mobile default styles for  the HTML5 search input box. Drop a comment in case you need to know more or need help with your Jquery Mobile application. I would be happy to help!

Jquery Mobile Form - Search input

    Input field of type search is newly introduced in HTML5 and is very well styled. The style is further enhanced when using the Jquery Mobile framework and we will see how this can be done in today's post. Jquery Mobile styles the search input type with capsule-corners and adds a 'x' icon to the right end, which clears the text in the search box.      The seacrch input elements are available in 2 flavors/sizes - regular and mini.   Adding a data attribute data-mini="true" to the input tag renders a smaller sized input element. Let's take a look at the code sample below to understand the working in a better way.      In the code above, you will see 4 different implementations of the input search element. The first one is a regular input of type search with the label and the searchbox one below the other. The second implementation is exactly similar to the first implementation with the only difference of the added data attribute "data-mini="tr

Jquery Mobile Form - Text inputs

    In this post on "form text input's" styling and usage using Jquery Mobile we will cover various input types and textarea styling using JQM. We will also cover the various attributes that can be used with the input types. Text inputs and textareas are coded with standard HTML elements, then enhanced by Jquery Mobile to make them more attractive and useable on a mobile device.     The text input elements are available in 2 flavors/sizes - regular and mini. Following is a standard HTML syntax for an input element.     Adding a data attribute data-mini="true" to the input tag renders a smaller sized input element. Let's take a look at the code sample below to understand the working in a better way.     Apart from the regular input type, to accept multi-line input, use the textarea element. The advantage of using textarea in Jquery Mobile is that, the framework auto grows the height of the textarea, avoiding the need for the content in the textarea

Default keyboards for HTML5 input types

    Following is the list of default keyboards that are displayed for the various HTML5 input types. These screenshots have been taken on the Android and iOs devices. Input type="color" Input type="date" Input type="datetime" Input type="datetime-local" Input type="email" Input type="month" Input type="number" Input type="number+pattern" Input type="password" Input type="tel" Input type="time" Input type="url" Input type="week"

Jquery Mobile - Introduction to form elements

    Jquery Mobile framework provides a complete set of finger-friendly form elements that are based on native HTML form elements. In the posts that will follow, we will take a look at the various form elements and the various properties that we can apply to these form elements.    We will be taking a look at all the form elements like input types, textareas, slider control, toggle switch, radio buttons, checkboxes and select menus. We will also be covering how to use the mini versions of each of these input elements, how to disable them, how to initialize them and how to use the refresh method on the form elements.     Hope you all enjoy the series on form elements like you loved the series on Jquery Mobile listview . Do drop a comment to let me know what you would want from this series and I would be happy to include those points. Share the word! Happy coding!

Jquery Mobile Listview enhancements and customization

    In this post today, we will take a look at the various enhancements and customization that we can do to the standard listviews. All these enhancements or customization are questions asked by various people on the Jquery Mobile forum. I have tried to put together a solution to some of them.     Let's take a look at a few of them. Some questions are really amazing like " W hen i have 3 nested listview structure and moved to 3rd nested, how to move back to second nested listview? " Now this is a really good question and a nice valid requirement too. When we had see an example on nested listviews  you must have wondered how we would navigate to the previous levels from the current level. Well here is a solution that I had put together.     Another really nice question was " Listview with collapsable listview inside ". This is really a good example to try out. Take a look at the solution that was proposed and also taken from other jsfiddles. There is this

Jquery Mobile accordions - Collapsible listviews

    "How do I add a collapsible list to my Jquery Mobile application?" If this is the question that's bothering you, then JQM has a solution to this and a pretty simple one. You can style the listviews as collapsibles very easily and you can have individual collapsible lists or a set of collapsible lists (accordions). We will take a look at how we can achieve both of these.     Let us begin with the individual collapsible listviews. You can achieve a collapsible by merely adding a div with data-attribute  data-role="collapsible" . This will style the div as a collapsible block with a default "plus" icon positioned to the left end of the list. To add a heading to the collapsible list add a heading tag (h1-h6) and you will have a left-aligned title for your collapsible header. After you have added the header, you can now have any content that you wish to include in the collapsible.     Let's take a look at the example below to better understa

Jquery Mobile listview with custom icon

    This is the last post in the series of Jquery Mobile listviews before we move on to Jquery Mobile accordions (collapsibles) and then a series on form elements in Jquery Mobile. Today we will see how to add a custom made, third-party icon in listview instead of the standard icons provided by Jquery mobile.     Wondering how to customize a list view, or adding a custom icon to a listview. Well there are 2 ways in which you can do this and we will see both.     The easy way #1:     Jquery Mobile provides the developers with creating a custom icon class something like a .ui-icon-custom  and then adding data attribute data-icon="custom" to the list item. Let us take a look at the example that follows. This example would make things all the more clear.     The difficult way #2 (My personal favourite):     Now adding a custom icon to listview done in this way would help you explore how Jquery Mobile works or resolve some issues like " How to change the default &

Jquery Mobile - Theming listview icons

    After exploring all the standard listview types in the series of examples on listview, you must have observed that for a linked list, Jquery Mobile displays a standard "arrow-r" icon to the extreme right of the list. However, you don't want the standard "arrow-r" icon and you need some custom icon there.     Jquery Mobile provides a set of icons that can be used along with listviews in place of the standard "arrow-r" icon. To override the standard icon, set the data-icon attribute on the desired list item to the name of a standard icon. We will see a complete list of icons in the following example.     However, before proceeding to the example, let us also consider a case where we do not wish to have any icon on the list item. This too can be achieved by setting the value of data-icon attribute to false. We will also include this in our example that follows.     Hope you have followed this post. Do drop a line in case you find any errors w

Jquery Mobile - Listview with thumbnail images

    In the earlier post we took a look at how we can add an icon to the listview. In the example that follows, we will be taking a look at how to add a thumbnail to the list item. The process of adding a thumbnail is pretty much similar to adding an icon to a list item.      Just add an image tag inside of the list item as the first child. The image would scale to a 80x80 pixel square image and positioned to the left of the list item text.     Lets take a look at the example below to understand exactly how this is done.     The above example is how Jquery Mobile displays thumbnails. But clients or the web designers never design what can be developed easily and so even I thought of having a variation for this example. How about adding responsive images as thumbnails? Images that will scale with the increase in width of a mobile device. I have set up a fiddle that we help us understand how this can be achieved. Let's take a look at the example that follows.  

Jquery Mobile - Listview with icon images

    We have seen a number of examples on Jquery Mobile's listview and in continuation to the series of these examples , we will take a look at how we can add an icon to a listview. This icon will be positioned to the extreme left of the listview as we have the regular right arrow icon on the right of the listview.     Adding an icon to the left of the text in a list item is pretty simple. Just add an image tag inside of the list item as the first child and add class ui-li-icon to this image element. The image would scale to a 16x16 pixel icon and positioned to the left of the list item text.     Let's take a look at the example below to understand how this is actually implemented.     Hope you have followed the example above. Drop a line in case you need further explanation on this or have any doubts. I would be more than happy to help!

Jquery Mobile - Text formatted listview

    "The regular listview looks plain. I want to add a few other details in my list item." Have you also faced this requirement from your client? Well, for those who have and also for those who haven't yet, you can keep in mind that you can create a text formatted listview using JQM and design accordingly for your next project.     Let's take a look at the following example to understand how text-formatting can be achieved seamlessly.     As you can see in the HTML code above, to add text hierarchy, you need to use headings to increase font emphasis and use paragraphs to reduce the font emphasis.   Supplemental information like " Last update: April 9, 2013 " can be added to the right of each list item by wrapping content in an element like 'div' or 'p' with a of class ui-li-aside.     Now let's take a look at the CSS part. You will notice that I have included some CSS on id " no-ellipsis". If you have noticed, in the fi

Jquery Mobile - Listview with count bubbles

    Today we will take a look at how to add count bubble for a list item. Jquery Mobile includes text formatting conventions for a list item with count bubble. The count bubble appears at the right end of the list item just before the right arrow icon, if it is a linked list item.     Like any other feature in JQM, adding the count bubble is a pretty simple task. Wrap the value that you want to display in the count bubble, in an HTML element like div and add the class ui-li-count to it. Doing this will add a count bubble to your list item. Take a look at the example below which will help you understand the implementation better.     Hope you have followed this example and have grasped the implementation. Drop a comment in case you have any doubt and need something to be explained better in this post. In case you want to check more jquery mobile examples you can find a complete list of code samples here .