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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
Everybody Loves a Palindrome
In the same vein as the previous article on PastryKit, we’re going to take a look at another web app framework, iUI, that can help you more easily develop a far richer experience for your users. iUI was developed by Joe Hewitt, the same man behind FireBug, which gives Firefox the ability to inspect web [...]
Pull to Refresh
This time, we’re going to talk about a particular piece of UI: the “pull to refresh” paradigm. This was initially seen in Tweetie 2, which is now the official Twitter for iPhone. The basic principle: if you have a list of items that can be refreshed from an online source, like a list of tweets [...]
Minty Fresh!
This next app is a companion to a website for managing your finances, Mint.com, which cannot be recommended highly enough, but we’re here to focus on the app itself. An interesting tidbit with this app is actually its icon design. The icon itself (seen to the left), looks rather plain when viewed using iTunes Preview [...]
Everybody Likes Pastry!
One of the things about a web app that really sets it off as not being native is the scroll behavior. On a native app, when you slide or flick to scroll the viewport, iOS detects this and grants inertia and speed based on your finger movement. And, like in the real world, “friction” occurs [...]
Some Nice Hot Cocoa
We’ve touched on object-oriented programming and discovered that there’s much more to learn there, but those concepts have been explained elsewhere. So instead, let’s now examine the Cocoa application environment. What is this tastily named API? It consists of two parts: a runtime aspect and a development aspect. The runtime portion is what your end [...]
Into the Amazon
Now we’re going to look at the Amazon Mobile app. This is Amazon.com’s free universal iPhone & iPad app. Upon launching, you’re greeted with a welcome page reminiscent of the home page you might see at Amazon.com, and if you’re signed in to the app via your Amazon.com account, this page will be personalized with [...]
The Eyes Have It
This go-round, we’re going to tackle the issue of iPhone 4 and how to draw things beautifully to its Retina display. Before we dive in, let’s define some terms. Pixel: More precisely called a device pixel, this is a unit of measurement. In this article “pixel” alone refers to a physical pixel, a single point [...]
Object of My Desire
Now that we’ve taken a look at an app, and some of the pieces of Apple’s iOS SDK used to build it, let’s take a step back & examine just what, exactly, we’ll be using to create our apps. Apple has provided the iOS SDK, but really, that’s just a name for a large group [...]
Your Supermarket Trips Will Never be the Same
Previously, we looked at another app by Sophiestication, Articles, but this time we’re going to take a look at another effort of theirs, Groceries. Now you might be saying “Really? A grocery list app?” but it’s so brilliantly done that you’re never going to use your notepad again.The whole app has a “cork board” background [...]
Further Adventures in iOS web app optimizations
Now that we know all about optimizing a regular site for iOS, let’s explore setting up a web app specifically designed for iOS. There are a number of great examples: touch.facebook.com, Hahlo (a brilliant web app Twitter client), Harvest, and many others. So what makes them great? First, all of these web apps have used [...]
