Today, we’re pleased to announce that we’re open-sourcing the Mobile Bookmark Bubble, a JavaScript library that helps users of your web application bookmark the app to their home screen, just like a native app. We’ve been using this library in several of our own web apps, and hope you’ll find it useful for your users, too.The bubble, which currently supports iPhone, iPod and iPad devices running iPhone OS 3 and above, slides in at the bottom of the application with instructions for creating the bookmark. The bubble automatically slides back out again after a few seconds if the user does not interact with it. HTML5 local storage is used to prevent the bubble from being shown after the user has dismissed it too many times. The amount of time the bubble remains visible, as well as the number of times the bubble can be dismissed, can be easily configured.
The Mobile Bookmark Bubble is released as an open source project under the Apache license, and is available now on Google Code. The repository includes a small sample application demonstrating how the library can be used. If you’d like to send feedback or have any questions, please see our discussion group. Happy hacking!
By Neil Thomas, Software Engineering Team
