Incorporating HTML5 into Facebook Applications

Over the last couple of months I’ve had clients request that their Facebook Applications should all be useable on an iPad or other tablets and in some cases mobile phones. I can see their reasoning behind this as there’s a lot of rich content being placed into these tabs/applications and they want to go for a maximum audience.

I’ve been the using HTML5 video and audio tags to present multimedia to users with a Flash fallback options (for those IE 8 and below users!) which is a great and simple way of integrating videos and music into an application (and website). There’s some quirky ways the mobile Safari overlays its controls (which was a hurdle when overlaying images and buttons on top of the video) but it works really well.

I’m looking into the HTML5 Canvas tabs at the moment and I’ve started to mimic the Window’s Metro interface that has recently been rolled out onto the XBox 360 dashboard and their phones. Each widget/icon is a canvas that pulls in dynamically the image, text or icon to display and clicking on the widget will either present more content or change the state of the widget. It’s pretty cool!

During the last couple of months of 2011 I was doing some great apps for companies like EasyJet, PlayStation and Waitrose – Agencies are always coming up with new ideas to interact with their Facebook Fans and require developers like myself to implement these ideas (often in extremely tight timelines!). I’m looking forward to see what 2012 brings in terms of new developments and cool ideas that need to be translated into workable applications!