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Too Epic Tumblelog

mrgan:

Nial Giacomelli has done a bang-up job with Showtime, his web app for keeping track of your favorite TV shows. It’s not fabulous “for a web app”, it’s fabulous period.

John Gruber has two fair and true complaints about it:

1. Scrolling (it’s slow even at maximum speed.)
2. The ON/OFF toggle switch has to be tapped (instead of the deeply satisfying native ability to slide it as well.)

As someone who’s into iPhone web apps, I’m going to side with Nial and focus on the positive.

The latter problem, the toggle, is fully solvable. There’s no technical reason this can’t be done with Javascript; it’s just not a ton of fun recreating native behaviors (who am I kidding - yes it is, sometimes!) If Nial doesn’t fix this soon, I’ll take a crack at it. But here’s the punchline: when it’s fixed, it’ll be fixed on everyone’s copy of Showtime the next time they launch it. How much would SDK developers give up to gain that ability?

The former problem - scrolling - may be trickier, or even unsolvable (or not!) It’s a bummer. But, I can live with it. I know Nial’s developing this with a pocket knife and a can of plumber’s putty, so I’m granting him a generous handicap.

iPhone-style checkboxes with touch events are entirely feasible. There’s even a jQuery plugin available to do just this. I’ve never used it in a project myself, but their demo page works as expected on my phone, dragging and all.

Oh, and Showtime’s not so bad either.

Back in February, my mother commissioned me to churn out a redesign for her website to go along with her upcoming book of short stories, set to be released in September. Her former site, also written by myself (back in 2005), was a series of hand-updated html pages. I took this redesign as an opportunity to add some much-needed dynamic content to the site.

Because my mom was a bit intimidated by the prospect of maintaining a conventional blog, I decided to rely on tumblr as the basis for the news section of the site. The prime criterion that led to selecting tumblr over self-hosted lightweight blogging engines, such as Chyrp, was tumblr’s straight-forward dashboard interface. Even my technologically inept mother managed to figure out how to click “Text,” fill out two boxes, and tap “Create Post.”

The rest of the site was hobbled together with jQuery and Simplepie. Simplepie is a goliath of an RSS parser (the single PHP file is a whopping 348 KB), but it was easy to bend to my will for use in a google calender-backed events page. I’m also filtering posts through Smartypants for typographical correctness.

I’ll probably come back to optimize the site further down the line, but for now my client is appeased, and I’m sleepy.