I just wanted to deliver on the book update I promised last week.Mobile Web App Cookbook is rolling now, with actual words being written. That’s pretty exciting for me.

What’s even more exciting is that we’re finally set with co-authors to do the technical chapters. I wanted to take a minute to introduce them, since they’re going to be the real stars of the show, providing the hands-on expertise the book is going to deliver. Me? I’m just a table-setter.

Anyway, here they are, the rest of the team (in order of appearance in the book):

Mike Morley

Mike is going to be doing chapters on the core technologies (HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript.)

MIKE MORLEY is a freelance mobile user interface developer at 9eggs.com and has spent many years building web applications for financial institutions and digital media agencies. For the past few years he has specialized in developing mobile web applications for a range of clients from UK high street retailer New Look, the car manufacturer Ford and the UK lottery. When not building mobile web apps he may be spotted on the golf course or walking along the coast near Colchester (UK), where he lives with his wife Rachel, his young son and Chocky the dog.

Rich Freedman

Rich is going to be working on the jQuery Mobile section.

RICH FREEDMAN is a consultant at Chariot Solutions, where he works with a wide variety of technologies for clients ranging from startups to members of the Fortune 500. Rich has over 20 years of application development experience. He has been blogging about software development for several years, is a DZone MVP blogger, and has reviewed several books for Manning, including JQuery in Action and Roo in Action. When he’s not programming or reading or writing about programming, he’s probably in the kitchen, whipping up a gourmet vegan meal, while thinking about programming. Rich lives in Lambertville, New Jersey, a small and architecturally wonderful 18th century city.

Lee Boonstra

Lee is going to be working on the Sencha Touch chapters.

Lee Boonstra lives together with her partner in Amsterdam the Netherlands. While doing her study (Art & Technology) in 2004 she started her own web development company to continue to grow and learn new technologies. Right now her focus is more on mobile (web) apps. Her most successful app is available at the Apple Appstore and Google Chrome webstore: Spotlib.

In the last year of her study she worked for Accenture as a senior back-end (Java) developer for clients such as UPC and KLM/Air France.
After 3 years she decided to make the move to the front-end. “I think it’s advantageous to understand back-end technologies while working on the front-end. I’m a creative person and I like to have a nice workflow and see my changes directly on the screen.” In 2009 she started working as a front-end team lead for eFocus, one of the top 3 fullservice internet agencies in The Netherlands. “I’m working with a lot of (front-end) technologies & frameworks, and that is why I love my work so much: jQuery (Mobile), Mootools, Dojo, CSS3, HTML5, XML, SQL and recently Sencha Touch”. As a team lead she works on both mobile and web for middle to large scale clients, such as Deloitte, Heineken and Philips.

Beside technologies, Lee’s other passions are alternative music, attending concerts and festivals and (what she is famous in Amsterdam for) being a drag king performer and model. And let’s not get started about how extensive her videogame (console) collection is…

Just in case you missed it the first time I mentioned this event, HTML5 Live is just a couple of days away and I’m getting excited for my presentation. It’s on a topic I love, getting people up and running with emerging standards, it’s in New York and the rest of the lineup is excellent. It should be a great event. If you’re going to be there please make sure to say hi. I’m there just for the event so I’m going to be happy to talk about this stuff as long as there are people willing to listen

Here’s the description:

HTML5 From the Front Lines: What to Embrace Today (and What to Avoid)

As an engineer working on big, consumer sites and applications, Rob Larsen has had hands-on, production experience with pretty much every emerging technology that’s available in a modern browser. In this session Rob will draw on that experience to walk through the current standards landscape and share his take on what technologies are worth using right now and which should be avoided.

This is also the first presentation I’ve done since I moved to Sapient Global Markets, so that’s another exciting wrinkle. For those of you waiting on the post about my new job, I’ll be writing that over the next couple of days.

It’s an exciting opportunity so I want to do it justice when I share it with all of you.

Like the subject says, I’m going to be presenting at HTML5 Live in November.

Here’s the description:

HTML5 From the Front Lines: What to Embrace Today (and What to Avoid)

As an engineer working on big, consumer sites and applications, Rob Larsen has had hands-on, production experience with pretty much every emerging technology that’s available in a modern browser. In this session Rob will draw on that experience to walk through the current standards landscape and share his take on what technologies are worth using right now and which should be avoided.

It’s a good lineup and it’s in New York. What more could you want?

As the title says, I’m working on a book. I signed the agreement yesterday so I’m finally be able to share the news with all of you. It’s been in the works for a while, so getting it to the point where it’s something I can talk about is a pleasure.

The book is with Manning Publications and the title is Mobile Web App Cookbook. As of right now, it looks like it’ll be out in the first half of 2012.

It’s going to be multi-author book dealing with, you guessed it, mobile web app development. I’m the lead author, setting the tone for the book and providing the framing chapters. As of now, I’m planning on introducing the factors driving mobile web app development; providing an in-depth examination of the full range of technologies in play and then wrapping up the subject in a closing chapter. In addition to my contribution, several other authors will provide detailed examples using technologies like Sencha Touch, jQuery Mobile and pure HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript.

It’s going to be a serious, technical introduction to an increasingly important branch of web development.

I’ll be sharing more details as I get them.

Why Mobile?

While I’m happy to be writing a book at all, I’m especially excited by the mobile focus of this project. To me, getting people and organizations excited about mobile web development and the continued evolution of the web platform is vital. I believe that a free and open web is a force for positive change in the world. For the web platform to remain viable and win out over app stores and other proprietary, closed ecosystems, people need to have the knowledge and tools to develop world class, cross-device applications for mobile devices. This book will help people do just that.

That’s pretty cool.

Here’s the description of the panel I’m on:

HTML5 and its Impact on Enterprise Architecture (Location: Room 1)

Although not yet ratified as an official standard, HTML5 support is showing up across a variety of different browsers. And for very good reason: HTML5 includes support for an important range of functionality – much of which has a direct bearing on Enterprise 2.0 applications.

Join a panel of experts who will critically review the prospects for HTML5 across three areas:

* Enterprise Architectures
* Social Computing Applications
* Mobile

HTML5 is not a panacea, but it should simplify application development and help enterprises support a much wider set of mobile platforms. Come find out how.
Moderator – Jarrod Gingras, Analyst, Real Story Group
Panelist – Jonas Jacobi, Co-Founder and CEO, Kaazing Corporation
Panelist – Rob Larsen, Interface Architect, Isobar

I’ll be focusing on the mobile angle. I’ll be doing a 20-25 minute presentation and then will stick around to answer some questions.

It should be interesting as the audience for this is going to be far different than my regular open source and developer-centric audience. The really interesting part is that I’m going to be able to sell HTML5 to a crowd that might not be totally hip to the fun we’re already having.

In it, I make a small argument for using HTML5 as a generic marketing term. I’ll be following up on that a little later, here on this blog.

Anyway, check it out. The resources section is worth it alone.

HTML5, CSS3, and related technologies.

Web standard development and marketing

It’s a great time to be a web developer. After a long period of hibernation, the standards bodies and browser vendors have been extremely busy over the past few years, generating a torrent of exciting technology. Developers are greedily seizing on this work, producing demos and full-blown applications at a steady pace. Fed by this activity and further boosted by the growth of their standards-capable mobile browsers, companies like Google and Apple are using these new standards to market their products and services. The wider press is also seizing on this wave and pushing standards hype well beyond the normal circle of web developers and browser vendors.

This volume of discussion has obvious benefits, of course. People getting excited about web standards is a positive development for everyone in the industry. From that perspective, the persistent use of blanket terms, especially HTML5, as a sort of brand shorthand for “emerging web technology” is a useful shortcut. It allows nontechnical people to grasp—in a generalized way—the exciting work being done in the standards space right now.

Interestingly, even the W3C has gotten into the act, using HTML5 and its associated logo (see Figure 1) to publicize the “web platform.”

Read the rest…

So… the site I’m working on has one of those “increase text size” controls. On this project it’s turned out to be one of those features that shows up in comps and somehow falls through the cracks until later on in the project cycle. Situation normal, really, as it isn’t a big feature. It’s just one of those things that needs to be buttoned up before the site can go live.

Anyway, I was thinking about how to do implement it the other day. I haven’t done one of these in a long time and the only other time I did one it involved crafting separate, albeit small, style sheets for the larger text sizes. I didn’t want to go that way again. Basically, I just didn’t want to write new style sheets- even small ones.

What’s a fella to do?

zoom

So, thinking about it a little bit, I seized upon using the non-standard CSS zoom property. Supported in Internet Explorer (zoom:1 is often used for a hasLayout toggle) and Webkit browsers, it would represent a simple (1 line!) CSS solution to this problem. It’s also one that I like better aesthetically as the site looks the same, just bigger. I figure there’s a reason all browsers have moved to this behavior when hitting ctrl+.

The problem was figuring out an equivalent for FireFox and Opera which don’t support zoom

Enter CSS 2D Transform

A little searching and experimenting later I came up with the idea of using CSS Transforms and the scale value to approximate zoom in browsers that lack support.

Let’s see how I did it.

As you go through the following keep in mind this hasn’t actually gone through testing yet so something weird could yet shake out. I just wrote this code yesterday, so you guys can be my sanity check.

Also, is anyone else doing this?

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We finally launched the new Isobar North America site. It had been in a soft-launch phase for several weeks as we worked out the kinks. Now it’s official.

I worked on it and, amazingly enough for an internal project I’m happy with it.
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And here it is:

CSS 101 from Matt Murphy on Vimeo.

Slides.

It’s pretty good- minus the difficult with actually showing the jsfidddle code on the projector.

I’m going to be writing a bit more about practical development topics here over the next few weeks. Code is fun to write about but code takes time. Sharing my experience and opinions on the day-to-day life of a front end engineer I can do with a little less effort. Also, since I’ve been doing it forever and have experience all over the place I feel like I just might have something to share.

Anyway, today I’m going to continue to talk about the technical interview process. This time with an anecdote culled from my time on the other side of the desk.

I was interviewed a while ago by someone who was significantly junior to me. I think he had maybe 3 years of experience. I was supposed to have been interviewed by someone who would have been a peer at the company, but that fell apart and it fell down to a junior resource. He asked me two questions over a span of ten minutes. Both were worth commenting on, but I’m going to focus on the first one as it illustrates something pretty important about who you have interviewing people and what they should be expected to be able to figure out about a candidate.

We get on the phone, trade pleasantries and then he gets started. He asks me the following question:

“You have a div with a width of 300 pixels. It’s got a margin of 10 pixels. How big is the box?”
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