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by eli_s 5608 days ago
Great work, however it's far short of the quality of Sencha Touch.

I have to wonder what the point of mimicking native UI is.

I've just started learning Obj-C and iPhone dev and getting ones head around basic UI functionality is at most 2-3 days worth of playing around. Is is really worth sacrificing native performance and consistency for such marginal gain?
2 comments
sequence7 5608 days ago
Shocking as it may sound not all mobile devices are iOS, in fact most aren't. jQuery mobile lets you target a huge number of devices. See the supported browsers page for a list:

http://jquerymobile.com/gbs/

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eli_s 5608 days ago
Performance of these types frameworks on anything other than the beefiest mobile hardware is woeful.

I get your point though... 1 click deployment to multiple devices is a great feature.

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sequence7 5608 days ago
True, performance on older mobile hardware's not great, my old htc hero runs the demos at a pretty glacial pace. But it wasn't so long ago that javascript performance was apparently so poor that web apps would never catch on and remember this is an alpha version so it's going to get quicker.

I do agree native apps are going to be more appropriate in a number of situations though.

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Toddparker 5608 days ago
The main focus of jQuery Mobile is NOT to be a competitor to native apps written in Objective C or even Sencha Touch. We aim to build touch-friendly UIs based on HTML5 for web apps and websites that are easy to build and work across a huge variety of platforms.

Sure, you can wrap a JQM site into an app with something like PhoneGap but I agree that a native app will always be more "native" and perfomant.

People never compare web apps built with jQuery UI to native applications created for desktop platforms, so it's a bit puzzling when we see developers try make comparisons between apps built with jQuery Mobile and Objective C. They are completely different tools, each with pros and cons.

The emphasis of the project is on embracing the web for mobile and I think that is the best way to judge the success of this framework.

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eli_s 5607 days ago
Thanks for the clarification Todd - this makes perfect sense.

I think what confuses the issue for many people, myself included, is that other frameworks(Sencha) are trying to recreate a pixel perfect iOS/Andriod UI/experience in HTML.

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