jQuery Mobile 1.1.0 Released

jQuery Mobile is a powerful jQuery-based framework for building websites for mobile devices. It is quite impressive in that it allows one to create a fully interactive experience with integrated Ajax support, navigation theming etc. without writing any code at all. Rather one can build quite powerful interfaces using just HTML5 with information about the presentation and interaction added as data attributes.

The latest release of jQuery Mobile 1.1.0 brings a number of improvements to the framework, particularly in the areas of toolbars and animations.

With this release, jQuery Mobile uses the much more elegant position:fixed CSS property to enabled fixed toolbars rather than the older buggy JavaScript-based solution. While this new approach doesn’t work on all platforms — that was the reason it wasn’t implemented this way in the first place — a fallback to the old method is provided as an optional extension.

The way page transitions are conducted has also been revamped, and the new method is now much smoother and faster. One thing the jQuery Mobile developers have made quite clear is that the performance of transitions on Android is abysmal, and there isn’t much that can be done about it. As such only newer Android platforms (3.x and 4.x) will support the bulk of the transitions, older Android versions will get a simple fade effect, no matter which effect is specified. Two new transitions, “Turn” and “Flow” have also been added.

Besides this with jQuery 1.1 you can also expect the following:

• A new subtler Ajax loader design that is configurable
• A “mini” version of all form elements
• Support for data-ajax=false on containers
• A new data-enhance attribute that allows turning off jQuery’s automatic enhancement features for a container
• A new improved version of ThemeRoller, which is a tool for creating jQuery Mobile themes.

You can find out more about this release from the release post and can download it from thejQuery Mobile website