jQuery Alpha 4.1 maintenance release

Posted on by

Thanks to everyone who helped us get Alpha 4 released last week. Overall the response has been great but there were a few important issues that cropped us once the new version was out in the wild that we wanted to address sooner as an official release.  So today, we’re release Alpha 4.1 as a maintenance release.

Demos & docs | Key changes | Additional fixes | Download & CDN

Key changes

Here are the key issues and fixes this release addresses:

PhoneGap file:// fix for Ajax navigation

After Alpha 4 was released, we continued to hear issues about Ajax requests with file:// extensions failing in PhoneGap. We discovered that the fix we landed to set the dataType: “html” parameter for all jQuery Mobile Ajax requests disappeared between commits and didn’t end up included in Alpha 4. We went ahead and re-applied this fix and have confirmation that links are now working like a charm under PhoneGap.

Virtual click tweaks

Overall, the new virtual click system seems to be working great across our target browsers and provides a centralized way to smooth out all the event differences across platforms. However, the way we were handling clicks in the new virtual click system was causing issues in certain cases: click handlers in custom code weren’t being called consistently, and if you tapped quickly on an element, touch and click target mismatches made it look like there were two click events on elements like Back buttons, list views, and other widgets.

We fixed this in 4.1 by changing the virtual click handler to fire on the click event (instead of the vclick event) and setting prevent default. This change introduced a noticeable lag in the visual feedback for the active state on lists and buttons so we made some tweaks to make the “perceived” visual performance feel as fast as A4 by applying the active state on vclick. We’ll continue to refine the events as we head towards beta, but this fix addressed most of issues we’ve been hearing about.

Scroll position fixes

Scroll position wasn’t being remembered when navigating back to a page in iOS. This was a regression from A3 and is an important part of how web pages and apps should work. We fixed this by setting the focus order on page show to 1) previously clicked item if revisiting that page 2) page title 3) first focusable item in the page. We have plans to further refine the way this works as we re-factor our page transition code to make it smoother for beta.

IE8 & 9 support

An error was causing jQuery Mobile to fail in IE8 & 9, but we’ve resolved the error by adding an activeElement conditional and pages now render suprisingly well. There are a few style tweaks needed to make this perfect, especially on form elements, but jQuery Mobile now works in IE 7, 8 and 9.

Additional fixes included in A4.1

The team is moving quickly with bug fixes and optimizations so in the last week, these issues also have been resolved and are included in 4.1.

Navigation in a multi-page configuration –  If you had a multi-page setup and if on the first page, you clicked on an anchor that linked to itself you’d see a blank page (an edge case, but possible).We fixed this by looking to see if the data-url matches the links href, and if so, it adds preventDefault and does nothing.

pagebeforehide and pagebeforeshow were returning undefined when referencing ui.prevPage and ui.nextPage. Fixed by passing a null event param for page _trigger beforehide and beforeshow (thanks Phil Barnes).

Ajax loading overlay was appearing beneath slider handles – We fixed this by setting loader z-index to be higher than the slider handles.

Checkboxes were only firing a change event when checked, but not when un-checked. We fixed the scoping issue that was causing the checkbox check to fail.

Project status and timing

We get asked all the time about exactly when jQuery Mobile 1.0 will be released and we understand that a lot of people are waiting for us to hit that milestone to use the library. As a project, we are committed to getting to 1.0 as quickly as we can while providing an exceptional user experience that works on the greatest number of devices and platforms. This is quite a challenge, but we feel it’s incredibly important delivering on the promise of the open web and universal access. Getting there will take time so we appreciate your patience.

As of A4, we are feature-complete for 1.0 and are focusing on perfomance, compatibility, bug fixes, API improvements, and documentation. In terms of timing, we were hoping to have the beta release ready for the jQuery Conference in SanFrancisco next weekend, but the complexity of landing the global namespacing and virtual click event systems for A4 combined with this maintenance release have pushed our timelines out a bit. At this point, we still have a fair amount of major platforms to debug (Nokia, BB5, etc.) and a solid list of issues to fix so beta is still a few weeks out at a minimum. The exact timing for beta and 1.0 are going to be determined by the quality of the code and device support, not a rigid timeframe, because we want to ensure that 1.0 is rock-solid.

Going forward, we’re going to be blogging more frequently with interim updates on what we’re working on so you can follow our activities as we move towards 1.0. The team is very active so we’re excited to share our progress so the community can give us more immediate feedback and take advantage of fixes as they land. As always, we maintain an active jQuery Mobile Twitter account and “jquerymobile” Channel on freenode IRC  for day-to-day updates, tips and Q&A.

Download

We provide CDN-hosted versions of jQuery Mobile for you to include into your site. These are already minified and compressed – and host the image files as well. It’ll likely be the fastest way to include jQuery Mobile in your site.

CDN-Hosted JavaScript:

CDN-Hosted CSS:

Copy-and-Paste Snippet:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://code.jquery.com/mobile/1.0a4.1/jquery.mobile-1.0a4.1.min.css" />
<script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.5.2.min.js"></script>
<script src="http://code.jquery.com/mobile/1.0a4.1/jquery.mobile-1.0a4.1.min.js"></script>

If you want to host the files yourself you can download a zip of all the files:

ZIP File:

Comments are closed.