jQuery Mobile In Pictures

Today I’ve got a little pre-release sneak peak for you (sorry for the blurryness!) 

Between the 15th and 16th of this month, the jQuery team are going to be meeting for the annual jQuery conference in Boston. At the conference the jQuery project is going to be announcing jQuery Mobile – the first fully mobile optimized version of jQuery that aims to encourage developers to write web applications that can work on not just the desktop, but also on a number of mobile devices too.

The screenshots below are actually from jQuery Mobile. All of the UI elements are rendered using CSS3 so there isn’t a single image in any of the interfaces below, short of the jQuery logo (and a Justin Bieber album cover..don’t ask!). I think John Resig and the rest of the team have done a fantastic job of bringing the mobile project to life.

A few of you have wondered how you’re actually going to use jQuery Mobile. As has previously been mentioned, the release won’t be distributed as jquery.mobile.js but will instead be integrated with the main jQuery 1.4.3 distribution. There are several benefits to this, including that for less than 1-2KB (minified), you’ll get all the mobile support along with the desktop/core standard features.

Some of also wondered how you’ll get all of the UI elements below – would it be distributed with jQuery UI? would the core somehow provide this?. Whilst integrating jQuery mobile with jQuery UI is going to be a goal of the project (which we hope to achieve in a few months), in the short term if you would like access to all the CSS3 UI elements included below, you’ll need to include a separate file along with jQuery 1.4.3 to be able to use them. John Resig confirmed this when I asked a while ago so I’m assuming that it’ll stay true for the launch.

We’re most likely going to do a full writeup on the jQuery mobile release either on the jQuery.com blog or over at jquerymobile.com so watch this space for more info once the official release is out!

- Addy