With the increasing popularity and ease of use of smart phones and mobile devices like the iPhone/iPad and Android handsets, mobile data traffic is expected to rise 40-fold over the next five years at an estimated growth rate of 117% year on year – seeing data traffic figures rise from 8 petabytes/month to 327 petabytes/month in 2015. While admittedly a large proportion of this traffic will be video data, mobile web browsing will continue to soar in popularity, meaning demand for highly functional and content rich sites will rapidly increase too.
This means that we will all collectively (as developers) be building a lot more enhanced mobile enabled sites, which finally brings me on to the point of this post. As a developer working in a fast moving agency, I really appreciate anything that will help save me time, whether it be past snippets of code, or free to use frameworks. A particular mobile framework that stands tall amongst a hot bed of available frameworks is the HTML 5 MobileApp Framework, by Sencha.
Sencha Touch allows your web apps to look and feel like native apps. Beautiful user interface components and rich data management, all powered by the latest HTML5 and CSS3 web standards and ready for Android and Apple iOS devices. Keep them web-based or wrap them for distribution on mobile app stores.
Built with web standards
Sencha Touch is the world’s first app framework built specifically to leverage HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript for the highest level of power, flexibility, and optimization. They specific use of HTML5 to deliver components like audio and video, as well as a localStorage proxy for saving data offline. They have made extensive use of CSS3 in their stylesheets to provide the most robust styling layer possible.
Sencha Touch is a cross-platform library aimed at next generation, touch enabled, devices. Their initial beta is compatible with iOS and Android, which together represent over 90% of current US mobile traffic. Android developers can also make use of a special theme they’ve created just for Android.
As the core method of interaction in a touch-based app, robust touch events are vital to the framework’s architecture. On top of the standard events supported by the browser like touchstart and touchend, they have added a long list of custom events that can be used like tap, double tap, swipe, tap and hold, pinch, and rotate.
Just like their other frameworks, Sencha Touch comes with an incredibly powerful data package. Developers can easily request data from a wide variety of sources whether by Ajax, JSONp, or YQL, bind that data to specific visual components or templates, and then take that data offline with localStorage writers.
Sencha Touch is available to download now from the Sencha website. Have fun.