When developing responsive layouts, often you’ll come across navigation that’s tricky to arrange, due to size, number of items, etc. One of my favourite ways to tackle this problem, is to hide that menu and replace it with a standard dropdown menu, when the viewport hits a certain size. It’s simple, and will work on almost every phone.
My mobile web app Breeze, has been updated with a few new features and fixes. The most notable being the 4-day forecast! I originally planned to have the forecast as an option, but decided to skip the hassle and just drop it in. This is because the forecast data is loaded in already anyway, so there is no increase in load time for displaying it. To access the forecast, simple swipe to the left. You may have noticed I also themed the settings controls to match the night time theme. They looked pretty stupid before, and they fit in much nicer now. The next feature I’ll be working on is a customizable threshhold for the night theme. This means, you can choose your own hours for when it’s active. Owing to the way seasons and different areas of the world wor, I think this wil be a nice touch. If you haven’t checked Breeze out yet, visit http://labs.syropia.net/Breeze on your iPhone and proceed to add it to your homescreen.
Breeze is a simple mobile web app that gives you the day’s forecast at a glance. It provides you with the current temperature (including the high and low), current conditions, and forecasted conditions, for your current location. It makes use of the HTML5 geolocation API which provides longitude and latitude coordinates for the GeoNames API. The results from the GeoNames API is then used to resolve the query for obtaining the weather via Google’s weather API. Yes, that’s a lot of APIs. Breeze also makes use of a wonderful icon set by Adam Whitcroft called Climacons. The downside to using all these external services is that I’m completely at the mercy of the data the APIs can provide. There have been instances where a users location was succesfully found with GeoNames, but Google didn’t support that particular city to actually pull the weather. I’m hoping to resolve this by including other weather APIs to try and access if Google’s first fails. Breeze was written by myself, as a fun little project one weekend. I essentially finished all the core functionality in a day, and have been slowly improving it & fixing bugs since. It was written with PHP, jQuery and CSS3. To use it you must have location settings turned on for Safari on your phone, and you must be running it directly in the browser OR as a homescreen app (preferred).
As a few of you may know, when I moved back home to Barrie, after school was finished, I could no longer keep my job at Niagara Research & Innovation. This was a little bit discouraging because Barrie is not an easy place for a web designer to find a job in the field. Regardless, I applied to a few different places, and even intially heard back from one. Unfortunately, they never followed up, so I remained jobless.
Then one week ago, I received an awesome email from Bijan Vaez. He saw some of my work on Forrst, and noticed that I live pretty close to Toronto. He told me EventMobi, a company he co-founded, was looking to hire a talented front-end designer, and that he’d love to have me on board. After a few days of email conversation, we agreed to an interview for Friday the 20th.
Yesterday, I made my way to downtown Toronto to go meet the team. We had a great chat about design, code, and they also gave me a little more insight into what exactly their company produces. Shortly after I left, they dropped me a quick email saying they’d indeed like for me to join their team!
I’m really excited for the opportunity to work with these great folks, as they are, and will be producing some really awesome stuff. Make sure to check ‘em out!
(Source: jrnl.syropia.net)
