jQuery Mobile 1.0 Final Released

jQuery Mobile has been a great mobile framework from the beginning in summer of 2010. I always liked the framework for its simplicity and a plethora of documentation.

Being it on site documentation or resources and tutorials that could be found around the internet (even here you can find jQuery Mobile Tutorial: Basics and jQuery Mobile Advanced Tutorial), this framework is very well documented.

Coming out of their mouth:

Equally as important, we set out to make this framework easy for developers to get up and running fast, with a minimal learning curve.

So let’s see what is new.

ThemeRoller

ThemeRoller is a web-based tool that makes it super simple to create custom themes without writing a single line of CSS. Drag and drop colors to create your masterpiece, then share it via URL or download a ZIP file with your custom theme stylesheet, ready for production (or additional tweaking).

Yeah, it is that awesome. Enough said, go and check it out on ThemeRoller page.

The main man behind the ThemeRoller is Tyler Benzinger, a guy who was borrowed from Adobe.

When you create your awesome jQuery Mobile Theme, just download the zip archive with compressed theme file (for production) as well as the uncompressed ones (for tweaking). Inside an archive there is also an index.html file as sample of how your theme is working on jQuery Mobile elements. Awesome.

One more thing: the complete source code for the new jQuery Mobile ThemeRoller tool is open source under the standard jQuery project licenses for you to improve, remix and build into your apps. The core tool is designed to work completely client-side to make it easy to drop into your code — only the download and sharing features require a bit of PHP. Go forth and fork it on GitHub.

Performance

The team spent hours and hours optimizing the framework and gain 30-50% better performance than RC2 release. They are already working on improving touch event responsiveness, page transition and scrolling smoothness and other important factors in upcoming releases.

Resources

As I said earlier, jQuery Mobile has a huge community that has been incredibly active writing plugins and extensions, building frameworks and tools that enhance the library, and writing tons of articles and tutorials. There are now 8 books on jQuery Mobile and many more in the works.

All resources can now be found in brand new Resources page.

Other news

There are other great stuff on their pages like new documentation site, quick start guide, the oft-requested data-attribute reference, a set of global configuration test pages that let your easily preview key settings, a PhoneGap tips page, detailed documentation on the experimental touchOverflow feature, info on how to access new features of the fixed toolbars, and much more.

Since jQuery 1.7 was just recently released and has some significant changes (and improvements), only 1.6.4 is officially supported at this time. 1.7 support is planned in version 1.1.

All you need to get going is putting this 3 lines inside your HTML file:

[code lang=”html”]

[/code]

Platforms

jQuery Mobile has broad support for the vast majority of all modern desktop, smartphone, tablet, and e-reader platforms. In addition, feature phones and older browsers are supported because of their progressive enhancement approach.

Get the full list of supported platforms

I am excited with this release, as this is a full-blown HTML 5 Mobile framework.

What do you think? Share your comments below…