Tag: Finicky

I’m doing more work on bringing Finicky to HTML. Another interface that I wanted to reproduce was a custom input for note fields. It’s basically a hand-drawn top and bottom to user editable notes with a hand writing font. As you fill the notes, the area expands and the bottom moves with the expansion. It’s another cool UI tweak that my designer came up with that I want to honor in this version.

My first pass at it tried to use border images to fill the images as border-top and border-bottom on a textarea. I had one giant problem with that: CSS Border images are very unsupported. I couldn’t get them to work on Chrome, and they don’t appear to be accessible on a lot of browsers yet including the mobile browsers I am targeting.

My next pass was using a textarea. I got a little further along, but textareas are static. They don’t expand to fit the content. In fact, that’s sort of the opposite of their intent. They are supposed to stay static to accommodate large amounts of content. I’m sure I could do something with JavaScript to make that happen, but I hate doing that. No rational reason for that. I just feel that every time I use JavaScript to handle a display/style issue, I die a little on the inside. If I can do it in CSS, so be it.

My next attempt used the new HTML5 attribute “contenteditable.” Contenteditable basically says that the content in a given element is editable by the user. This means that I can just create a div that is user editable. The div has the added benefit of being able to dynamically resize itself when new content comes in. This is exactly what I am looking for.

It works perfectly until I actually go to use it in my mobile app. Surprise, surprise, contenteditable isn’t supported on Android yet.

So it’s back to textarea and JavaScript manipulation. (And a little piece of me dies.) There is a jQuery plugin that will make a text area expand with more content, but it seemed a little heavy since I’m not using jQuery in this application. The basic method is pretty straightforward:

• Create a placeholder for a mirror of the textarea content
• Create a function for onkeyup for the textarea that:
  • Sets the mirror content to be the content of the textarea
  • Grabs the height of the mirror
  • Sets the textarea height to that height

http://snipplr.com/js/embed.js
http://snipplr.com/json/62437

http://snipplr.com/js/embed.js
http://snipplr.com/json/62438

The basic solution is spelled out in this post on the textArea jQuery Plugin.

I went one step further and created a CSS transition that smooths out the height change of the textarea.

http://snipplr.com/js/embed.js
http://snipplr.com/json/62439

That’s a long road to getting it done, but it works. Here’s a working demo of it.

I’m currently working on porting Finicky over to HTML5 as a training exercise for building real applications (as opposed to more demoware) with HTML5 for mobile. It’s going fairly well, but there was one piece of UI that I was really worried about. It was a little complicated to render in ActionScript, and I feared it might be impossible in HTML. In fact it’s one of the few things I found much easier.

On the edit page there is a button for prompting you to take a picture of an item that you want to save. When you haven’t taken a picture, you see a little camera icon on the button. When you have already selected an image, you see a circular mask of the picture inside a circular frame created by the button. Look at the picture; it’s a lot easier to show than to explain. My designer really did a cool job there on that piece of UI, and I wanted to replicate it.

My first instinct should have been to look up “css mask” as it would probably be the easiest way if it was implemented. I didn’t. I instead went with using border radius to shape my button into a perfect circle and positioning it on top of the original button. In reviewing information on CSS Masking, I don’t think it would be the perfect solution. The images that I’ll be using in my final product are going to come from source images of different sizes. My method allows me to drop in any size/proportioned image into the background-image CSS property of my link and have it still work as a perfect circle. However, my research there makes me want to explore CSS masks more.

Anyway, back to the main point, how did I accomplish this?

First, I make an a link that I’ll use an a as the interactive part of the UI, as well as the holder for my picture. And I’ll wrap it in a div that will hold the button graphics.

http://snipplr.com/js/embed.js
http://snipplr.com/json/62377

I give the containing div a background-image containing the button graphic and I hard set the size to match the image size.

http://snipplr.com/js/embed.js
http://snipplr.com/json/62378

Once the container is done, I turn the a link into a circle by giving it a border radius of 50% of the height and width of the element. (I also used a background-color to see where I was putting it. )

http://snipplr.com/js/embed.js
http://snipplr.com/json/62379

Then I set the positioning to relative, to offset it within the containing div. I then fiddled with the top and left until the circle link was pretty equidistant from all sides of the containing div. It wasn’t just straight math because the drop shadow in the graphic made the blue circle of the button not completely in the center of the png file.

Finally I made a class with the picture I wanted to place in the background-image of the button.

Couple things to note here:

• I hard coded the CSS for demonstration purposes, in my app, I’ll just add the background-image dynamically via the DOM.
• This, like all awesome things, won’t work in versions of IE earlier than 9.
• However, it has much more support than using masks, so I think it also wins on that account.

Here’s a demo with the full source.