Mobile Development with APEX 5.0

In APEX 5.0 a Tablet User Interface will be introduced. The idea is not that you will end up with three user interfaces (Desktop, Tablet and Mobile), but use te Tablet UI for desktop usage as well. You might even want to use the Tablet UI - as an common "average - for all devices.

The plans are to include something like Themeroller into APEX 5.0. So you can 100% skin your application within APEX.

APEX 5 will include the jQuery Mobile features that are available on the moment that 5 ships. Because the current version of jQM (1.3) contains features as panels, reflow tables and column toggle (the current version of APEX ships version 1.2 - and "upgrading" to a higher version of jQM will not work for 100%). A new CSS Calender component will be available with more flexibility, so it supports drag and drop on mobile devices.

jQM 1.4 will have some theme improvements: One theme (swatch A), a flat look, switching from icons to SVG - so the images will look better on high resolution screens. Also tabs and content containers are foreseen. And these new features will be exposed to APEX as well.

In 5.0 the menu is created in a slide-in panel (instead of a list on the home page). So it's by default accessible from all pages. "Responsive Table" will be one of the reporting options, with a "Reflow Table" as Table Mode. Then the report is laid out vertically or horizontally - dependent on the screen size. "Column Toggle" us another Table Mode. Then you specify your "priority columns". Then lower columns will be dropped (or hidden) from the report, dependent on the screen size. However you can pick the columns you want to show or hide during runtime as well.

All looks very promising ... but we have to wait until 2014 for general availability!

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