The upcoming ZK 6.5 focuses on incorporating responsive design principles to afford developers the ability to create web applications which have an excellent user experience on desktops and tablet devices without writing separate applications.
Designing for tablets
The experience of tablets is different to that of desktops. Not only are their screens smaller, the way users interact with the applications is different. This means that developers need to change their thinking in order to provide a better user experience centered on application layout and methods of input.
ZK 6.5 steps in and does this for you!
Some of the benefits & changes in ZK 6.5
Using ZK’s core components with only little variation in CSS, it is possible to produce applications which support both desktop browsers and tablets. For a demonstration please check the video below:
In order to provide the best developer experience as well as the best user experience, ZK 6.5’s components behave differently depending upon whether they are displayed on a desktop browser or tablet. As seen in the video, some of these components behave differently on the tablet in the following ways:
Colorbox: Starting from its button, gradient block and circle bar to spaces between buttons are all magnified to suit the Tablet user experience better.
Datebox: Changes its input style totally; a calendar no longer appears, instead a spinning wheel styled datepicker is used for easier operation and experience.
Listbox: Hides the scrolling bar and capture swipe event such that end users are able to simply swipe down to scroll and browse.
We have tuned our components carefully to provide developers with the ability to write one application and have its style and behavior adapt to the desktop and tablet environments.
To try
To try, you can clone the source code or download war file, and run it on your environment. You can download the application using git and then use maven to build and run the application.
Traditional Tooltip can’t be shown on tablet, the reason is the difference in nature between desktop and tablet. Touch behavior cannot simulate the “mouse over” action.
does it have a release date? 2013?
Yes, it will release soon in September 2012.
You guys are great!
awesome!!
Awesome! What about tooltips, is it possible to show them on tablets?
Beautiful. Is this the new zk approach to tablet apps? What about zk touch?
Does ZK plan to support Eclipse 4.2 Juno? When will release?
Hi Ondrji,
Traditional Tooltip can’t be shown on tablet, the reason is the difference in nature between desktop and tablet. Touch behavior cannot simulate the “mouse over” action.
If you have any idea on this, please do share. 🙂
Regards,
Monty Pan
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