CFClient: The Agony & The Ecstasy -- Making It Purty
In my last entry, I discussed my decision to create a "CFClient Sampler" app that would simultaneously allow me to play with each mobile client API, all the while providing the community with some nature of blog-based documentary on my attempt. With a solid proof of concept under my belt (and on GitHub) I pushed forward with two goals in mind this time:
- Pick another API to play with
- Figure out some organization for the code before it got out of hand
- Ok, I guess there was a third goal too: Make it not so ugly.
I'll start with the last one, which was to make the app not look like a middle schooler banging something out with Microsoft FrontPage. Quite frankly, I suck at UI stuff. I'm a "function over form" guy and I'm quite happy architecting the back end of an application far far away from the perils of CSS, responsive layouts, and viewports. For this I used my phone-a-friend and dialed up jQuery Mobile. JQM has been around for a while and it doesn't make web pages that very unique (kind of like the BootStrap cookie cutter sites) but it's stupid simple to setup and covers every major navigation, button, control, and layout concern I'll be detailing with.