Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Announcing jQuery Mobile 1.4.0 Alpha

The jQuery Mobile team is thrilled to announce the 1.4.0 Alpha release. For this release we focused on performance improvements and reviewing widgets. We also introduced a new default theme and SVG icons. Some of the new features that come with this release are a flip switch widget, a generic filter widget named “filterable”, popups with arrows, tooltips for sliders and we integrated the tabs widget from jQuery UI.

Performance

To improve performance we reduced DOM manipulation. Generation of inner markup for elements styled as butons has been completely removed. In many cases the framework just adds classes to the native element during enhancement and we even reduced the amount of classes that are added by the framework.

Theme inheritance

One of the biggest changes is the way theme inheritance works. In previous versions we used JavaScript to find the nearest parent element with a theme and added theme classes to all elements. This has been replaced by a pure CSS solution where the level of specificity of the selector determines what theme (swatch) is applied. In almost all cases the default for option theme has been removed and widgets get the same theme as their container or page via CSS.

New default theme

This was also a good time to switch to a new default theme with a flat, more modern, design. The number of swatches has been reduced from five to two; a light “A” swatch and a dark “B” swatch. We will update the ThemeRoller soon so you can create your own themes for 1.4.

SVG icons

Not only the theme is new. A big thank you to Glyphish for creating a complete new icon set for jQuery Mobile! These are vector-based SVG icons, but we included a fallback to external PNG icons on browsers that don’t support inline SVG. We are also going to provide additional stylesheets, each with different icon CSS (inline SVG, data-uri PNG, and external PNG) that can be used with the full Grunticon solution.


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