Joe Hewitt, the creator of the Facebook iPhone app, Firebug, and former contributor to Mozilla’s Firefox, announced earlier this month that he was leaving Facebook to go build “tools.” What sorts of tools? Not just mobile tools, but “tools for writers, designers, programmers, whatever,” he wrote on his personal blog.
Since then, many developers have been eagerly anticipating the tools Hewitt will create. Today, we get to see what one of those is: Scrollability, a script that brings native scrolling to mobile Web applications.
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What’s Scrollability?
According to the project’s website, Scrollability is a single script, that’s small, and with no external dependencies. You “drop it into your page, add a few CSS classes to scrollable elements, and scroll away,” the site explains.
Or more simply put, the goal of the project is to give mobile Web applications “a pretty darn good approximation of native scrolling,” the description reads on GitHub.
Currently, Scrollability is a work-in-progress, and is not ready for use by mobile developers. Documentation will also be written when the library is ready.
At present, it supports only basic vertical and horizontal scrolling, but, in the future, it will support snapping to pages, sticky table headers, a photo browser and more customization of the animation details.
How Does it Work?
Over on FunctionSource, Dion Almaer describes Hewitt’s solution to the problem present in JavaScript scrolling today:
Joe’s approach uses CSS transforms to do moving (element.style.webkitTransform = ‘translate3d(‘ ….) and is <a href=”“>fully customizable with constants to let you tweak the feel (from overscrolling, deceleration rate, bounce time, when to snap to a page, etc).
There’s also one Scrollability demo available here (works on iOS only, and best on iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 or iPad). The example is a Table View that Almaer says “feels pretty much like butter.” There will be other demos soon, but the project is still very new – in fact, it was only published to GitHub 6 hours ago.
Hewitt has been busy tweeting about Srollability on his personal Twitter account, too, to clarify details about the project (it copies the UITableView scrolling physics, not UIWebView), his plans to bring it to Android (he’s looking forward to getting an Android device so he can test on it), and perhaps mostly importantly, why he’s doing this. To one naysayer, he explained it well: “there’s this thing called the Web?”
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