Design & Development
Service worker toolkits and libraries
March 9, 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
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
Measure your Website Performance on Mobile
November 23, 2015, by Martin Clancy
Mobile Web - Bigger than Apps Back in 2008 (yes, it was that long ago), Mary Meeker made her famous prediction that mobile would eclipse desktop by 2014. Fast forward more than half a dozen years and the latest KPCB mobile statistics show that mobile now accounts for 51% of time spent online in the USA. Mobile traffic growth still ramping... Read More
Web app manifests usher new wave of progressive apps to your homescreen
November 3, 2015, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
One can’t deny the irresistible convenience of using a homescreen launcher icon to fire up a web app. Variously referred to as a bookmark icon, shortcut, or homepage icon, why shouldn’t such an icon be able to launch a web page, as well as a native app? And of course it can: this functionality has been available in Android and iOS for years. Indeed, the notion of a desktop shortcut has been around since the first GUI interfaces were developed. So why are we still talking about them in 2015?... 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
