I gathered 30+ major browsers I have worked with (plus a few I have never even seen), and categorize by the markup that browsers can render – WML, CHTML, XHTML-MP, and HTML4.

So, here you go. If you find some mistakes, let me know!

I have categorized only with the markup type, and did not sub-categorize these browsers. However, if I would, I may want to grade XHTML-MP devices with page memory size (=”deck size”, yes I said deck size), and screen resolution for UI design purpose.

To grade full-HTML browsers, you need to spend massive time and effort on testing rendering capability with CSS, and Javascript DOM compatibility, events, etc. Actually, PPK has done excellent work on mobile browser testing, so you can simply visit Quirksmode.org!

Ever since I heard of Snow Loepard’s hardware-accelerated CSS, I wanted try some cool CSS animation for Safari 4.

So after installing Snow Leopard, I spent about a day and half to try creating my first 3D animation with Flickr API.
Honestly, I wasn’t sure where to get started to make some cool 3D effect, so what I did was I tried to reproduce the one on webkit.org example and modify a lot by trial and error approach.
Also, I have been freqently asked about how I did with “My Favorites” feature on my Palm Pre app (which is also a WebKit-based), so I throw the HTML5’s local storage demo with this 3D demo.

So here, you can try my CSS 3D and Local DB Demo!!!
Be sure to view this demo on Safari 4, iPhone Safari, or WebKit Nightly! This doesn;t seem to work on other Webkit-based browsers such as Chrome and Palm.

I am not going to write a whole tutorial how to replicate this animation but I try to explain some examples.

Spin a Wheel!

Look at one of the flicke photo wheel on my demo. This is a combination of a few different animation.
Let’s focus on the small wheel inside. This is the snippet of HTML of the wheel:

<div id="gallery">
  <div id="pic01"><img src="..."/></div>
  <div id="pic02"><img src="..."/></div>
  ... (10 more imgs)
</div>	

OK, for now, let’s ignore how each photo is rendered to form a loop, and just focus on the animation of one div, #gallery (= a wheel). A band of photos is ratating clockwise around Y-axis.
This means the animation starts as -webkit-transform: rotateY(0); and goes around an circle for a whole 360 degree. -webkit-transform: rotateY(-360deg);.
Use positive if you want to rotate in opposite direction.
I set the whole circle completion span as 60 seconds in linier motion and the animation goes infinite.

This diagram from Apple’s Safari Reference Library explains coordinates.

So the css for this movement is defined as:

#gallery {
  -webkit-transform-style: preserve-3d;
  -webkit-animation: spinY 60s linear infinite;
}

@-webkit-keyframes spinY {
  from { -webkit-transform: rotateY(0);}
  to   { -webkit-transform: rotateY(-360deg);}
}

Use 3D style, -webkit-transform-style: preserve-3d;to give 3D illusion. I set the initial perspective in its parent div as -webkit-perspective: 380;.
It gives you an illusion of the depth. You can make the value lower to make it look more up-close to you.
The unit of perspective should be “px”, but it looks like you’d better remove it for iPhone.

To figure out how to render each photo in loop, also other animations, please look at the source code of my demo.

Also, I will write about how to use HTML 5’s local storage sometimes later!

References

• 3D Transforms by Webkit.org
• CSS Transforms (2D) by Webkit.org
• CSS Animation by Webkit.org
• CSS 3D Transforms Module Level 3 W3C Working Draft
• Safari Reference Library -Transforms by Apple

As a front-end web developer, also a mobile-web developer, the Palm’s new WebOS SDK for Pre sounds very attractive, and I could not wait to create some applications although I am still a iPhone user and haven’t been convinced to switch a service provider.

Then I felt like, I already got this web app, iCuteoverload for iPhone but yeah why not for Pre? So I decide to re-create the same app from scratch. Sure, the existing app is a web app that wrote with JavaScript framework iUI and PHP, does run fine on Pre’s web browser since Pre is based on Webkit browser. However, I wanted to make this app a standalone client with Mojo framework so I needed to code from scratch.

Anyway, here it is, iCO for Palm is now available at PreCentral. The official store is not yet open, so the installing the app may require a bit of geeky skills, but if you happen to be a Pre user and would like to try, follow this tutorial on how to install homebrew apps on Pre for Mac users (And this is for Windows users instruction).

By the way, I keep this app name begins with i, because I already have named so for iPhone and wanted to keep it for consistency. However, in Pre community, this seems to be a pretty bad thing to do. People see me as a clueless Apple fan

Ta-da, finally there’s an app for that! – I mean an iPhone native app that I involved is available on App Store!

This app is called, MuniApp, and this gives you access to San Francisco’s MUNI transit system on the go with real time predictions for buses, metro and cable cars.

I have worked on some UI and icons, while my friend Alberto has coded all the Obj.C. We are both SF residents and rely on MUNI pretty frequently and we do use this app on daily basis. Honestly, this is really simple and useful app

The official website for MuniApp is at www.obapp.com/muniapp

To directly go to App Store on iTunes, go to this link!

After I was rejected for the early access then struggled with the “leaked” version of Palm Mojo SDK without a documentation, today Palm finally made the official SDK available for all!!!

I haven’t playing around with it long enough to blog much about it, so I just post my “cheat sheet” that I keep on Stickies.

Emulator Key for Mac

• Esc – acts as “Back”
• Left / Right arrows – Switch between applications

Emulator Navigation

“Host” = Right Ctrl in Virtual Box

• Host + F – Toggle full screen view on/off
• Host + N – Display session info
• Host + S – Take a snapshot (will be placed the Snapshot tab of VirtualBox)
• Host + Q – Close the emulator

Commands

Create a package (.ipk file)

$ cd palm-package myapp

Install the .ipk file on emulator

$ palm-install com.yourdomain.app.myapp_1.0.0_all.ipk

Launch the app on emulator

$ palm-launch com.yourdomain.app.myapp

Launch the inspector with the app

$ palm-launch -i com.yourdomain.app.myapp

Then, open Palm Inspector app (comes with SDK) from your Application by double-clicking the icon. This should open the Safari inspector.

iPhone OS 3.0 is now available, and developers can take advantage of the newly introduced geolocation feature in Safari browser.

To try it out quickly, I used Twitter Search API again to create a tiny test app called, NeighborTweet, which enable you to find out who are tweeting in your neighborhood. Basically, what it does is that obtain your location, and pass the latitude and longitude data to Twitter search and display the result tweets.

Try it out on your iPhone with:
Short URL http://bit.ly/K0ZaE
or
This QR Code with scanning app like BeeTagg.

If you are interested in learning more on Twitter search API and geocode, please read Twitter Wiki.

OK, now here’s the code.
To find out your location with Geolocation class is simple – you just call getCurrentPosition() method. This initiates an asynchronous request to detect the user’s position.

navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(someFunction)

Get latitude and longitude, by using coords instance:

latitude = position.coords.latitude;
longitude = position.coords.longitude;

Here’s an actual code I used to create the sample app:

if (navigator.geolocation) {
  navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(function(position) {
    callback(position.coords.latitude, position.coords.longitude);
  });
} else {
  alert("Geolocation services are not supported by your browser.");
} 

function callback(lat,lon){
  // twitter search json-p callback
  var geocode = "&geocode=" + lat + "%2C" + lon + "%2C1mi";
  var fullUrl = url + geocode;
  ...
}
var url = "http://search.twitter.com/search.json?callback=getTweets";

function getTweets (json) {
  // display json data
  ...
}

References

Geolocation References:

• Safari Reference Library – Getting Geographic Locations – Apple Developer Connection
• Using geolocation – Mozilla Developer Center
• Geolocation API Specification – W3C Working Draft

More References:

• Twitter Search API Wiki
• Remote JSON – JSONP

Basically, this grabs Twitter “trending topic” terms, and as a user click on each term you want to know about, it displays news articles, images, and Bing results (usually summary from Wikipedia helps you to figure out what the term means in general).

If you are Twitter user and ever wonder what people are talking about, give TweetTrendDunno a try!

According to ComputerWorld blog, the geolocation API has been implemented for the upcoming API. Apparently, Seth of ComputerWorld tried the test webpage, built by Doug Turner for Mozilla on a 3.0B5 iPhone’s Mobile Safari.
This screenshot is grabbed from the CompWorld’s blog.

Obviously I don’t have access to the new iPhone so I just tested the test page (http://people.mozilla.org/~dougt/geo.html) using Geolocation API watchPosition() method, on Mozilla 3.5. (And this should works similarly on Fennec too. I wish I could try on an actual device!)

I am using my old PowerBook G4, with Comcast,. Since this Mac is not equipped with GPS device, Firefox gathers information about nearby wireless access points and computer’s IP address.

Nice! I can’t wait to see this working on iPhone!
Especially, NextMuni.com with location enabled, that tells me where I am and where the nearest bus stop!

This is the screen capture of the animation on Safari 4.

You can try
the actual HTML page and see it working on current WebKit Nightly build or Safari 4.

To display the Katakana characters, I used @font-face rule to embed a Katakana dingbat-like font, rather than using an actual Japanese input.
Although I wanted display the kanakana vertically with using writing-mode: tb-rl, which I believe has been proposed for CSS2, this is not supported on Webkit so I had to use -webkit-transform to rotate each div to 90 degree to display vertically.
This way, each letter faces 90 deg angle too, but oh well, this Japanese letters are random, used only for visual purpose and don’t mean anything so I guess this doesn’t matter for now.

Let’s take a look at some of the CSS3 code, I am showing only important parts so if you would like to view the entire code, just open up the htmlpage and use Webkit’s inspector!

Embed A Katakana Font

@font-face {
  font-family: Katakana;
  src: url('MoonBeams-katakana_.TTF');
}

#matrix{
  font-family: Katakana; /* use the embedded font */
  position: absolute;
  ... (more styles here) ...
}

@font-face rule is not supported by older Safari including iPhone.
On supported browsers, you should be able to use either TrueType (.ttf) or OpenType (.otf).

Define Animations

@-webkit-keyframes fade{
    0%   {opacity: 1;}
    100% {opacity: 0;}
}
@-webkit-keyframes fall{
   	from {top: -250px;}
	to 	{top: 300px;}
}

I used both % and from/to keywords. But with %, you can define in-between state.

Rotate the Katakana Strings

#matrix div{
  position: absolute;
  top: 0;
  -webkit-transform-origin: 0%;
  -webkit-transform: rotate(90deg);
  ...

By setting -webkit-transform-origin as 0%, the div block rotates 90 degrees at the far left.
If you don’t set this, by default, it rotates at center axis.

…and Use the Defined Animations

#matrix div{
  ...
  -webkit-animation-name: fall, fade;
  -webkit-animation-iteration-count: infinite; /* use 0 to infinite */
  -webkit-animation-direction: normal; /* default is normal. use 'alternate' to reverse direction */
  -webkit-animation-timing-function: ease-out;
}

For more detailed info on -webkit-animation properties, read Apple’s Developer Connection

Again, this example is currently working only on the latest WebKit and Safari 4 (not iPhone).
Google Chrome does not support @font-face or animation. (-webkit-transform:rotate... works), and I assume it does not work on Android either.
(And I have no intention to try on other WebKit-base browsers like S60).