Last week… most of my working time was spent on Today’s Guardian, not that you’d know it. Trying to make the site work nicely on iPhone and iPad has been harder than I expected and progress has been slow.
When it comes to front-end development I’m quite a conservative coder. My clients want sites that will work pretty much the same on any of the web browsers they or their customers are likely to use, and so I’m in the habit of using techniques that are solid and reliable. All this exciting HTML 5 stuff is great, and is moving things forward but, given Internet Explorer’s continuing lack of support, it’ll probably be years before I’m using much of it on a daily basis.
So I was barely aware of the crazy animation-type stuff that’s available in CSS in Safari these days. Getting my head round that, and using that instead of jQuery-based animation on iDevices, was satisfying but took a while (and still isn’t working properly, sorry).
I also struggled to get swiping gestures to work well — it felt like you should be able to swipe left/right to move between articles (although that also feels a bit tedious and gimmicky to me, and part of me thinks old fashioned stationary links/buttons would be easier). This isn’t too tricky, after Googling for examples, but having that interaction not interfere with the default vertical swipe-to-scroll action seemed tough. But delving into the lovely looking jQTouch provided a good example, so hopefully I’m on the right track now.
Now I need to start week 367.
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