Reading List
Bridging the gap between native and web
- Installable web apps by PPK: “The mobile browser “bookmark function should become “install and place an icon on the home screen. This icon starts up the web page or web app; likely from local memory.” Good article, though I disagree with the idea that the web app is a local copy – that’s re-inventing Widgets. It should be the live, instantly-updatable web site, “offlinerificated” with Service Workers.
- Meanwhile, Google’s Paul Kinlan disagrees: Add to Home Screen Is Not What the Web Needs. Is It?
- Manifest for bookmarking web applications draft spec
- A Review of apps that use network information – research by @marcosc on whether such API on Web is needed (or possible)
- The state of standalone apps on iOS – “we examined 360 web applications that claim to be capable of running “standalone” in iOS (i.e., the web application asserts that it’s usable outside the context of iOS’s default browser). We put those claims to the test by manually checking if the apps could, in fact, be used as standalone.”
- Service Worker + Push API – “outlines an API which integrates with the Service Worker to enable delivery of push messages to applications which do not have visible tabs”
- Media playback restrictions in Blink – “Blink and WebKit have a setting for requiring a “user gesture to play or pause an audio or video element … this gets in the way of reasonable use cases like games or playlists, and developers are not impressed … as an experiment we’ve removed the restrictions in Opera beta for Android. However, I’ve also found a workaround for current browsers.”
Standards
- Web Components in 2014 – “here’s the “plans and expectations” summary for the Web Components spec umbrella.”
- “Battle for baseline post by Roman Komarov about flexboxes and baseline aligning
- Bad Forms – a website cataloguing bad form design
- GOV.UK social sharing buttons: the first 10 weeks – “our users aren’t exactly demonstrating an overwhelming case for us retaining social sharing buttons at least on desktops”
- 4 HTTP Security headers you should always be using
- WhatFont – “easily get font information about the text you are hovering on” via a bookmarklet or extension
- Web Audio API – Boris Smus’ book online, free.
- Coding Accessibility: An interview with Steve Faulkner – “what user experience designers should know about how code supports accessibility” (contains beefcake photo, too)
- Wikipedia vs. the Small Screen – Just 1% of edits are made with mobile. “Will people continue to create articles and edit its nine million existing ones on the small screen of a smartphone or tablet?”
Misc
- The Efficiency of Drug Patents and Other Silly Things Economists Say – on the use of vitamin C as a cancer treatment “One potential hurdle is that pharmaceutical companies are unlikely to fund trials of intravenous vitamin C because there is no ability to patent natural products.”
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