Tag: iphone

Categories
Development

jQuery Mobile Hi-Res Images

I’ve been developing a little mobile app using jQuery Mobile and PhoneGap and ran into a little difficulty with supporting both Retina and earlier iPhone displays. Turns out it’s not too difficult using some CSS3 media queries.

However my hi-res images were showing up way too big still.

Simply adding the background-size attribute to what a “standard size” image should be did the job. It did make a lot of sense too, even though I hadn’t thought of it at first.

For instance, my 640px x 1136px image needed a background-size attribute of 320px x 480px to display properly on the Retina display since they pack a much higher pixel density.

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@media only screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio:2) {
    .ui-body-a, .ui-overlay-a {
        background: url('img/home_bg_2x.jpg') center bottom no-repeat;
        background-size: 320px 480px;
    }
}
Categories
Books

Developing Hybrid Applications for the iPhone

Developing Hybrid Applications for the iPhonePicked up a copy of Developing Hybrid Applications for the IPhone by Lee S. Barney earlier this week. Had a 33% off coupon at Borders and was itching for something new to read.

Been messing with iPhone development for a bit and since I’m a web developer figured I’d take a hard look at writing web applications for the iPhone vs going the SDK Objective-C route.

I’m really glad I picked this book up. They do an excellent job of reminding me how cool Dashcode is for developing web applications for the iPhone. My only knock on Dashcode in the past was the lack of documentation, but this book does a decent job of covering it. Still wish there was more documentation on Dashcode if anyone is reading this.

The book covers both using the QuickConnect and PhoneGap frameworks for developing hybrid iPhone apps. It’s a fairly easy read and they do cover most of the iPhone functionality that would be used in the majority of projects. While the SDK and Objective-C are still the best way to go, sometimes web applications or hybrid applications do make sense, and that’s where this book was very handy. Just for me to rediscover Dashcode alone justified the purchase.

Categories
Design

What the Font?

Found a very cool and usefull iphone app called What the Font? It’s very cool. It’s a app that helps to identify a font.

So for instance, you take a photo using the iphone of a font.  You then crop the image so just the font in question is selected. It then uploads the font and processes it letter by letter and gives back a list of fonts that it think it might be. It takes a minute or so for the whole process, but that’s so much faster than it would take to go through the thousands of fonts I have installed.

So far it’s turned out to be pretty accurate and has helped New Guy Mike and myself figure out what font was used in some old print documents that were created before he worked here.

It’s a very cool app so check it out at the App Store, and oh yeah it’s free too.