Tumble on Petros

I did my first ever commissioned website sometime in 1996. This commission found me in rather unusual circumstances, listening to jazz in one of my all time favourite places: The Half Note jazz club in Athens.

I got talking to the venue director, and was going on about sensual and ethereal jazz experiences, when he asked me what I did for work. As a programmer, my profession would have been rather obscure at the time, but I guess the web was catching up and Half Note wanted to jump in this particularly trendy band wagon. “Do you know how to do frames” he asked me. Some days later I started a stint at Half Note designing their website and thus gaining free access to my favourite club.

These days though, I do very little web stuff. I only use what’s required to get our iOS apps up and running, or helping out some other team member in a user experience capacity. However, just this weekend, many years after my Half Note story, I decided to get up to speed with HTML5. It was used quite successfully by the most talented Remy Sharp in a mobile web project I managed for the BBC (Dr. Who Dreamland), but I never spent some solid time with it.

So first thing, I got hold of Jeremy Keith’s book (which I was glad to see is only 90 pages or so). This meant I was able to get through it during my train journey to the infamous ATP music festival. Two days after the event there isn’t much I remember on what constitutes HTML5 other than you can shorten the doc type declaration to a bare minimum. Great stuff. But you don’t build interfaces for an app this way, do you? I was therefore even more pleased when on the return journey I picked up a CSS3 book and started reading more about interesting and familiar things like CSS transitions. I could get them right away, because they just resonate with concepts I’ve been tinkering with for yonks whilst doing Quartz stuff in iOS development.

So, after all these nostalgic ramblings, my plan is to cut my teeth on HTML5, whilst doing cross platform app development with PhoneGap together with Mr. Sharp for a forthcoming iPad book publishing project. I’ll tell you more about it once the contract is signed. Looking forward to see how this shapes up.