Yesterday I blogged a simple example of how to turn an RSS feed into a tag cloud. Today reader JP commented that it would be cool if I could mimic an effect he saw in a Flash based tag cloud. Basically, as you mouse over each word, they light up. Here's what I came up with.

Welcome to my third entry for my (what was at first) simple PhoneGap RSS reader. If you haven't yet, please be sure to read part 1 and part 2 so you have some context about how this application works. In this part, I'm going to tackle two enhancements suggested to me by my readers:

As a blogger, I write quite a few blog posts. I hate RTEs (Rich Text Editors) so I'll typically do most of any desired HTML by hand. Normally this isn't a big deal. My blogware can handle paragraphs and code formatting. I typically just worry about bold and italics. However, because I'm entering HTML manually, there's always a chance I could screw up. I've got a Preview feature on my blog but I rarely use it.

Earlier today I discovered the excellent Color Thief JavaScript library by Lokesh Dhakr. Color Thief gives you the ability to find the dominant color of a picture, or a palette of major colors. Check the site for examples. I thought it would be interesting to wrap this into a PhoneGap project and create palettes based on your camera. Here's what I came up with.

Yesterday on Twitter docwisdom asked me about using AJAX to persist form values while you edited data. This is something I've talked about before. I thought though it would be a great example to a) blog it again (I'm a believer in multiple examples, and worse case, the more I work on the client side the more comfortable I get) and b) a great time to compare a server based example versus a completely client side version using HTML5 technology.

For those of you at the mobile workshop in San Francisco today (or anyone, really), I've attached the PDF and code samples to this blog entry. Once the recording is posted, I'll add a comment below with that URL.

If you want another version of it - I'll point out my course at Udemy as another option.

If you attended my presentation today and have feedback, please leave me a comment, or use my contact form.

One of my favorite features of Adobe AIR, and in HTML5, is the ability to make use of a local SQLite database. For mobile or desktop applications, having a little mini-database is incredibly useful. While SQLite can't replace SQL Server, as a single user embedded database it's a great feature to have. One thing that can be difficult though is dealing with types in SQLite. SQLite only has a few basic types, one of which is not a native date type. It does support date style functions and can do basic parsing. Getting dates working correctly in your PhoneGap application can be a bit tricky. Here's what I came up - and as always - if folks have a better solution, please share!

During the Christmas break, I had the chance to look at, and play with, Parse. While you can check the site for the marketing description, the basic idea behind the service is a way to store data for mobile applications without the need for a server. I played with their API and was incredibly impressed by what I saw. Here's why you should consider them:

While watching the Saints completely devastate the Panthers this weekend, I noticed something interesting in the "info ticker" (or whatever they call it) at the bottom of the screen. Whenever an important score occurred in one of the other games, there would be a "Score Alert". You would see the previous score, like ATL: 0, NO: 43, and the team that scored would fade in and out, repeat, and come back with the new score. It is a great way to highlight what changed. I thought I'd try to duplicate the effect in jQuery. I'm sure this has probably already been done (a lot), but I figured it would be a good excuse to write code on vacation. Here's what I did:

I finally got time to wrap up my jQuery Mobile course for Udemy: http://www.udemy.com/introduction-to-jquery-mobile/. The course costs 20 dollars and is about an hour and a half. I also plan on adding 'Extras' as I get feedback from people on specific examples. (When you pay for the course, you have access to anything added later.) I learned a bit from my jQuery course and broke up the content into much smaller bits. I also tried to make it more obvious which files were used for demos to make it easier to follow.

As always - I welcome any feedback or suggestions. I know folks are typically hesitant to criticize conference sessions or blog posts, but as this is commercial content, I understand expectations are going to be higher.

If you do take the course, and like it, please post a review and rating. Thanks!