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About Jeff B
Jeff is a hybrid web developer and technical writer with experience both as a web developer writing HTML/CSS/PHP/JavaScript, as well as a technician who worked for Apple Retail on Macs, iPods, and, eventually, iPhones. His recent focus includes HTML5, CSS3, jQuery, and WordPress with some forays into Expression Engine and accessible markup. Jeff is able to translate his technical knowledge into accessible descriptive text for both end-users and novices learning to understand these new, complex technologies. His on-demand, flexible, and quick writing style has added tremendous value to blogs including writing technical online content for Artisan!
Posts by Jeff B
Resolution Dependent Layouts, CSS @media queries, and You
For this last one on mobile websites and web apps, we’ll take a look at a brilliant technique for making your website functional for both the desktop and the web. We’ve already seen one solution for offering a different experience: OpenMktApp’s redirect to their “install” page for first-time iOS visitors. Now we’ll look at a [...]
Local Notifications
For the last article, we’re going to discuss a lesser-known feature of iOS 4: Local Notifications. Previously, we had Push Notifications, introduced with iPhone 3.0, which offer a way around multitasking by leaving a server at the other end performing tasks for you and notifying you via a pushed message that you should relaunch your [...]
Review Time Children!
The last post in this series won’t focus on a particular app, but instead will be a review of sorts of the things we’ve learned throughout from the examples provided previously. While no examples of bad app design were presented here, it’s not hard to find them and with little exception all of these apps [...]
Blogging on the Go in Style
We’re going to get a little bit “meta” in this post, and discuss WordPress for iOS. “Meta” because this is a post on a WordPress-powered blog. WordPress being the powerful platform for communication that it is, Automattic decided to craft an iPhone app (and later develop it into a universal iPhone+iPad app) that gave access [...]
The App “Store” for Web Apps
We’re going to take a break from JS frameworks to look at an interesting site / web app that came across the radar recently: OpenAppMkt. You’ll want to check it out both on your desktop as well as on your iOS device, as each has a completely different interface. On the desktop, you’ll immediately begin [...]
A Pinch of This, a Touch of That
Let’s talk about something that has now become commonplace on mobile devices capable of having apps: touch screens. While that simulator that came with the device’s SDK can be useful, remember that it’s not a true substitute; it’s meant to test things when they’re in-progress. Once you have a working build, you need to install [...]
The Venerable iPod
We are going to take a look at one of the built-in apps: iPod. To clarify, on iPod Touch this app is split into two: “Music” and “Movies.” The functionality remains the same, however. Like so many other apps, iPod features its primary navigation along the bottom in a black bar, with a series of [...]
Just a Touch More
Continuing on our trek through the JavaScript frameworks that can improve your web app users’ experiences, we come to jQTouch. jQTouch is a little different from the other frameworks we’ve looked at, primarily because it relies on the jQuery JavaScript library, which is one of the most popular JS libraries out there. This does, however, [...]
Memory Problems
Let’s take a look at one of the lesser-discussed development issues surrounding mobile devices: memory. Why is this such a problem? Well, to keep it simple we’ll focus on the iPhone, as there are only 4 versions to take into account. Let’s look at each of the four: iPhone (aka iPhone 1, iPhone 2G) & [...]
A Very Test-y Relationship
Let’s talk about the stage of development after you’ve actually written your app: the testing stage. Conjures up all sorts of evil images from school, doesn’t it? Well relax, you get to be the test giver, and the idea now is to make the testing as painless as possible for your users, so they’ll want [...]
