WinterBoard - HTML as a background

Winterboard is amazing. Saurik, the developer of Winterboard, has just added dynamic backgrounds. Your background can now be an HTML web page using webkit. The possibilities are endless. He threw together a small theme called “Saurik” that fades in and out between two images as an example. But so much more can be done with this.

Comments from Saurik:

So, while staring at the desktop, I realized “wait, why don’t I make that a website? then you could do all kinds of neat things with it!”. This dream has been made a reality with the latest version of WinterBoard. There is a new file you can add called Wallpaper.html which puts a UIWebDocumentView behind SpringBoard.

This view has a transparent background and has been told not to clear what’s behind it, so you can set its background-color: CSS to transparent if you want to see through to Wallpaper.png (although you can also use standard HTML to handle the backgrounds now rather than resorting to that specific case).

The example theme, “Saurik”, uses this to do a cross-fade background between two images (as I really couldn’t decide which one I liked better ;P). Now, for those who have tried to do such effects before with MobileSafari and felt it was way too slow (as the JavaScript engine is miserable and the way it renders is equally bad) you should seriously check it out.

The way I did this (and this is just a property of my theme, you can do anything you want obviously) is to use the WebKit-specific CSS properties Apple provided us with for doing transforms and animations. These work beautifully and are super fast. For more documentation on these, you should go to Apple’s iPhone Reference Library and get the two guides they have for download.

via sleepers