Thursday 6 September 2012

jQuery Mobile apps flicker on page transitions

Flickering screen on page transtions seems to be a common issue in mobile applications created using JQuery Mobile (and most likely packed with PhoneGap). The most common solution you will find on the Web is to add the following piece of CSS to your html:
.ui-page {
    -webkit-backface-visibility: hidden;
}
The problem with that solution is that it breaks Select list on your forms (and apparentally any other form input fields as well) on Android system. This makes your forms unusable.

Some people create an additional workaround for that issue i.e. they change this style property direct before the page transition occures and disable it right after it completes. A bit messy, don't you think?

Luckly, there is a much simpler solution. I realised that this flicekring is caused by the default transition effect used i.e. 'fade' for page transitions and 'pop' for dialogs. The simplest way to fix it seems to disable any effects of page/dialog transitions. Here is how you can do that with a little javascript code:

$(document).bind("mobileinit", function(){
    $.mobile.defaultDialogTransition = "none";
    $.mobile.defaultPageTransition = "none";
});

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