Service worker toolkits and libraries
March 4, 2016, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
Overwhelmed by service workers? Here’s a collection of tools and libraries that will help tame this powerful beast!... Read More
Android phones sold better but iOS web traffic grew faster during 2015
March 3, 2016, by Pawel Piejko
If you’re based in the US and viewing this post on a mobile phone, 57% of you will be on an iOS device and 41% of you will use Android. This is one of the many statistics on mobile device usage you can learn from The Mobile Web Report for Q4 2015 put together by the DeviceAtlas... Read More
MWC 2016: Turning the spotlight on accessories
February 25, 2016, by Pawel Piejko
The world’s largest mobile industry conference has come to an end. The mobiForge editors were present at MWC 2016 having many inspiring conversations about the ever-changing mobile device landscape. Here are some impressions from this year’s new product releases and announcements that everyone was talking about in Barcelona. Fun accessories for your phone Every year new phones... Read More
Ad blocking: the new Android reality that Google must accept
February 11, 2016, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
As we continue into 2016, the ad-blocking saga shows no sign of abating, with a number of recent developments. This latest round of controversy kicked off late last month when Samsung included an ad-blocking feature in the latest version of its Internet for Android browser. It didn’t stop there though. Also included in this update... Read More
India says no to Facebook’s Free Basics
February 11, 2016, by Martin Clancy
Facebook's initiative to connect billions of unconnected users to the internet appears to have foundered on the rocks of net neutrality amidst a backlash from many commentators, not least the Indian Telecoms regulator... Read More
Firefox service worker puts spotlight on Safari
January 27, 2016, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
Firefox 44 arrived this week, and with it came service workers and push notifications, the latter dependent on the former. We’re big fans of the Service Worker API and the possibilities it brings to the web. Service workers power some of the best new HTML5 features, such as offline experiences and the just-mentioned push notifications... Read More
No HTTPS? Then say goodbye to geolocation in Chrome 50!
January 26, 2016, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
Do you use the Geolocation API in your web app? Then you need HTTPS, or it’s going to stop working later this year. Starting with Chrome version 50, the geolocation API will no longer work for insecure origins. This means that unless you’ve set up HTTPS on your site, it won’t work anymore. Why does... Read More
The state of the Web 2016
January 15, 2016, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
2015 was a tumultuous year for the web, but ultimately, it was a good one, even a great one! Let’s take a look at the some of the events that made 2015 one of the most interesting for the web in recent times. Canvas vs DOM The respective merits of using the canvas element vs... Read More
Mobile technology trends to watch for in 2016
January 13, 2016, by Pawel Piejko
Last year was truly excellent for the mobile world especially in terms of developments made to the web browsing on smartphones and tablets. Will 2016 be similarly exciting? Here’s what we believe is likely to make news in 2016. Web fragmentation and more focus on Web Performance According to mobile experts from Applause, it is... Read More
2015 year in review: an excellent year for the mobile world
December 22, 2015, by Pawel Piejko
2015 was a truly exciting year for the mobile world. Mobilegeddon, ad blockers, Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) were among some of the most frequently repeated buzzwords covered even in the mainstream media. 2015 was also the year when new solutions were introduced that can change the UX on mobile devices, such as Web Push Notifications... Read More
Android phones sold better but iOS web traffic grew faster during 2015
March 3, 2016, by Pawel Piejko
If you’re based in the US and viewing this post on a mobile phone, 57% of you will be on an iOS device and 41% of you will use Android. This is one of the many statistics on mobile device usage you can learn from The Mobile Web Report for Q4 2015 put together by the DeviceAtlas... Read More
India says no to Facebook’s Free Basics
February 11, 2016, by Martin Clancy
Facebook's initiative to connect billions of unconnected users to the internet appears to have foundered on the rocks of net neutrality amidst a backlash from many commentators, not least the Indian Telecoms regulator... Read More
HTML5 for the mobile Web: the Network Information API
November 24, 2015, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
The Network Information API is a HTML5 API for acquiring information about a device’s network connection. Despite not being a standard, it enjoys decent support across the main mobile browsers. It’s a pretty simple API to use, particularly in comparison with some of the HTML5 APIs we’ve looked at recently on this site (Service Workers, I’m looking at you!)... Read More
Taking the web offline with service workers
October 21, 2015, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
You’re probably already familiar with the idea of offline web apps, web apps that can continue to work in the face of intermittent network connectivity. This concept has been around for a while, and various technologies have been developed along the way to achieve offline web apps, (Google) Gears, and Appcache for example, but none of these addressed the offline challenge quite as well as service workers... Read More
Web push notifications
September 17, 2015, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
Web push notifications are the best thing to hit the web since the hyperlink! No kidding, this technology is going to be huge. Until recently web developers could only dream of push enabled web apps. Things have changed however, and web push notifications, the asynchronous delivery of messages to a user's device from a website, even when the website is not open in the browser, are now a reality thanks to a number of HTML5 APIs:... Read More
Touch-friendly Drag and Drop
July 22, 2015, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
In this article we explore some touch-friendly drag and drop implementations. In particular we'll be looking at DOM and canvas-based drag and drop approaches. We'll also build on some of the things we learned in previous HTML5 articles on mobiForge... Read More
Mobile Networks Statistics 2015
June 25, 2015, by Gregory Twohig
In this section you will find some of the most interesting statistics regarding the advancement of mobile network technology, along with information regarding mobile subscriptions... Read More
The HTML5 Pointer Events API: Combining touch, mouse, and pen
June 15, 2015, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
The Pointer Events API is an HTML5 specification that combines touch, mouse, pen and other inputs into a single unified API. It is less well supported than the Touch Events API, although support is growing, with all the major browsers working on an implementation, except for Apple's Safari. There's a colorful background to how the current state of browser support for this API came to be which we covered previously on mobiForge, but in this article we'll just look at its usage... Read More
The Oxymoron of Mobile Privacy
December 3, 2013, by ronan
Introduction There could hardly be a more perfect privacy invasion machine than today's smartphone. It's with you at all times, it knows precisely where you are, it can see and hear you and it knows exactly what you are doing much of the time. If data is the pollution of the digital age then your smartphone is an overweight 1970's V8 gas guzzler with asbestos brake pads, a leaky freon-charged AC system, burning leaded fuel as it barrels down the highway: you are silently spewing out reams of potentially harmful data all day, every day... Read More
HTML5 for the Mobile Web: Touch Events
August 15, 2013, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
With the widespread adoption of touchscreen devices, HTML5 brings to the table, among many other things, a set of touch-based interaction events. Mouse-based events such as hover, mouse in, mouse out etc. aren’t able to adequately capture the range of interactions possible via touchscreen, so touch events are a welcome and necessary addition to the web developer's toolbox. Use cases for the touch events API include gesture recognition, multi-touch, drag and drop, and any other touch-based interfaces... Read More
