jQuery Mobile in 24 Hours

The jQuery Mobile team announced today that you can start playing with version 1.3 right now. As a bonus you can report any bugs and help them get ready for the 1.3.0 stable.

Check it out the beta demos now!

So what is new in 1.3?

• Sidebar panels (think of the Facebook or Google+ app where the menu slides out in a panel)
• Responsive Tables
• Column Toggle
• More RWD friendly
• Range Slider
• Responsive Grids
• Navigate event method
• Page transitions with support for IE10 and Windows Phone 8!
• New search option for the Listview (like type-ahead, only with list items!)
• Dialog now has a close button option
• Popup modal click-to-close option (now you can tap/click out of the window and it does not close.. or does, all configurable)
• and MORE!

Also, the beta ships with jQuery 1.8.3, however when the 1.3.0 final ships it will run on the shiny-new jQuery 1.9! Congrats to both jQuery teams for their epic work and release schedules!

For more information read the official blog post over at the jQuery Mobile site.

IBM Worklight features jQuery Mobile

Yesterday I attended a proof of concept presentation for the newly acquired Worklight v5 product from IBM. The acquisition actually took place in February, but IBM has had to take the time to make sure that it would play nice and integrate with their server technology.

So what is one of the coolest parts of the platform? The fact that you can build your entire enterprise mobile application with jQuery Mobile. They have support for jQuery Mobile baked right into Worklight Studio (read as ‘modified eclipse installation’) and ready for use on your first and beyond project.

For those that want to checkout the Worklight offering, you can do so for free by going to the Eclipse Marketplace and searching for Worklight. This will install the plugin to your Eclipse environment and you can start creating projects from there. For those that want to use Dojo Mobile, they have a WYSIWYG drag-and-drop interface that can be used to help place mobile views and to create your app. Word on the streets is that a WYSIWYG version for jQuery Mobile is being developed and will be released soon (which I hope this rumor is true as it is a much easier sell for managers and marketers when they can see the interface rather than line after line of code).

You can learn about Worklight here, or you can download the developer studio here.

As always keep on keeping on, and let everyone know what you think by posting in the comments.

I’m happy to announce that Sams Teach Yourself jQuery Mobile in 24 Hours is now available at most book retailers including Barnes and Noble, Amazon, Safari Book, Pearson Higher Ed, and informIT.

The book writing process was a fantastic one that was full of late nights, last minute changes, and lots of testing. While I’ve already thanked quite a few people in the book, I’d like to extend that thanks to everyone who had a suggestion, comment, correction or otherwise.

Those wanting to pick up the book right now can use the following link to purchase the book from Amazon (in both the paperback and/or kindle variety).

Sams Teach Yourself jQuery Mobile in 24 Hours (Sams Teach Yourself — Hours)

As always, please let me know what errors you find (I’ve already found a couple – including a floating “n” in the first ‘about the author’ section), and I’ll have them noted so that future printings of the book don’t have these errors.

Those that are in marketing or are just curious about creating and using QR and Microsoft Tag codes can forgo the morning beverage and instead pick up the mini-book “Creating QR and Tag Codes” for their kindle with the link below:

Creating QR and Tag Codes

In another bout of good news, I’m also happy to announce that my second book has just left round one of editing and is moving into production! “jQuery, jQuery UI, and jQuery Mobile: Recipes and Examples” is slated to be released on November 10th.  This is an amazing book of recipes that you can use to get the gist of a particular jQuery function, or an actual snippet of code that you can use in your current projects.

Here is the link to the pre-order page on amazon:

jQuery, jQuery UI, and jQuery Mobile: Recipes and Examples (Developer’s Library)

For those of you using the RC1 or RC2 candidates of jQuery Mobile, the wait is over.  jQuery Mobile 1.1 Final was released last Friday (13th).  For those of you wailing on a bout superstition, know that yes, this will break the themes you generated with ThemeRoller.  Now for the good news, you can import your old theme into the updated ThemeRoller and convert it to work with jQM 1.1.

Other improvements on this release are “true” fixed-toolbars.  This is a wonderful addition as instead of having them disappear and then reappear (in jumpy fashion on Android), they will stick now.  Page transitions also have gone through a bit of a lift.  In RC1.1 the default slide transition was replaced with a fade transition.  It was cool, it worked, and then when I used it in a PhoneGap application, it was way to laggy to be useful.  I wasn’t the only one who ran into  issues similar to this one, and the jQM team put in some serious overtime working on the issue.  I’ll let you read about all of the new changes over at the official blog post.

For those of you who want to jump in and get started here are the CDN links:

<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”http://code.jquery.com/mobile/1.0.1/jquery.mobile-1.0.1.min.css” /> <script src=”http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.6.4.min.js”></script> <script src=”http://code.jquery.com/mobile/1.0.1/jquery.mobile-1.0.1.min.js”></script>

For those who prefer a local copy to work with, here is a link to the download page.

Big thumbs up to the jQM team and congrats on bringing out jQuery Mobile 1.1.0 RC1.  This is a phenomenal update to the already stellar jQuery Mobile platform.

Along with the update, the homepage of jquerymobile.com has been given a shuffle, and features a new drag-and-drop demo area.  This is powered by Codiqa and is not only entertaining, but extremely awesome and easy to use.

Features of the 1.1.0 RC1 release include

Fixed Toolbars (for real this time 😉 )

Improved Transitions (sorry Android fans, turns out the native browser (pre Honeycomb/ICS) is not super supportive on this)

New Loader Options

Support for jQuery 1.7.1

While this is mainly an announcement and I have glossed over pretty much everything, you should head over to the official blog post and check out all the goodies.

The time has finally arrived!  I’m happy to announce that anyone with a subscription to Safari Books Online can now start reading the Sams Teach Yourself jQuery Mobile in 24 Hours book.

Those of you with a subscription get to reading it and feel free to give me some feedback so that I can make sure that it meets the needs of the masses!

Those without a subscription can still pre-purchase the book and get access to the Rough Cut today! Just visit the site and then click on the purchase options tab to get started on your copy.