The Golden Link o’ the Week: Introducing Pokedex.org: a progressive webapp for Pokémon fans – “works offline, can be launched from the home screen, and runs at 60 FPS even on mediocre Android phones. This blog post explains how I did it.” A superb blogpost by Nolan Lawson.
Seriously, Don’t Use Icon Fonts – “It’s time to let icon fonts pass on to Hack Heaven, where they can frolic with table-based layouts, Bullet-Proof Rounded Corners and Scalable Inman Flash Replacements.”
Fontdeck to close. “Fonts will stop being served on 1 December 2016.” (Note: *next* year!) Migration plan etc in the link. The reason? “As neither OmniTI nor Clearleft have the resources to take Fontdeck to the next level, we had no desire to traipse around the Valley with a begging bowl; instead we took the decision to retire Fontdeck rather than let it wither on the vine.”
Unicorns and Bubbles in which Baldur Bjarnason writes “startups are generally staffed by cowboy coders who stack up lines of technical debt faster than a monkey playing Tetris”
Decommissioning a free public API – “relying on a free service you have no control over means adding a single point of failure on a volunteer basis” (by author of a side-project API that some set-top box manufacturer depended on
Opera’s Engineering Team meetup – evil bosses made me go to the south of France for an all-hands engineering meetup. Here’s a 4min video.
“Out of Sight, Out of Mind” campaign on ‘invisible disability (including mental health), with an short piece Nicky asked me to write about my multiple sclerosis for the campaign launch
Perhaps the funkiest, happiest song I’ve ever written. The tune and first verse were written while I was at university, and forgotten. Then a friend said two weeks ago “I guess I’m falling in love” while we were discussing her nasty bout of the unrequiteds. I remembered the song, wrote the rest, recorded it last weekend and mixed it yesterday with the help of Shez, my old friend and bass guitarist. A mere 27 years from conception to completion.
The bass was recorded in one straight take (the 57th take, to be precise). I wanted it tense and urgent, after Amy Lowell’s poem Vernal Equinox “Why are you not here to overpower me with your tense and urgent love?”.
Four and a half years ago I was moaning (me!) about the state of Installable web apps and interoperability (TL;DR: laughably crap). Everybody listened to me, and made them better. Well, actually, they didn’t, because I was wrong; I still believed in the notion that it was a good idea to download a static snapshot of a site, thereby losing all the immediacy and linkability of web publishing.
At their simplest, Progressive Web Apps are application-like things hosted on your web server. If you’re as old as me, you might call them “web sites”. They also point to a manifest file, which gives some light metadata about icons, default orientation and the like. In conforming browsers (currently, Opera for Android, Chrome for Android and, forthcoming, Firefox too) you can “save” the app to your homescreen. The relevant icon from the manifest is placed on the device’s homescreen which can then be tickled into life with your digit, indistinguishably from a native app: over HTTPS, if you so define it in the manifest, it can open in a default orientation and with no browser UI; with Service Worker, it can work offline.
Crucially, in browsers that don’t support it, you have a normal website. It’s perfect progressive enhancement.
There are differences in implementation; Opera and Chrome are working closely to see what works best. Opera’s implementation currently differs from Chrome’s in four main ways:
HTTP-hosted sites will only display with browser UI, regardless of what the manifest states, because they’re less secure.
when the user follows a link that takes the user out of the domain of the installed app, a new tab is spawned, with browser chrome. (Chrome shows a small address at the top of a standalone-app. We prefer to make it more obvious to the user that they have gone outside your app.)
Opera doesn’t (yet) support background_color; this will be added in a forthcoming release.
Chrome has a mechanism to suggest to a user that they add a site to Home screen called App Install Banners, depending on certain heuristics primarily, a Service Worker so they work offline, responsiveness and demonstrated repeated engagement with a site.
Opera is still experimenting with heuristics (and Chrome are tweaking, too). I’m convinced by Stuart Langridge’s argument that requiring “repeated engagememnt” may slow adoption:
Native apps get to say “install our app without providing a link, a QR code, whatever: people know how to do that… [with Progressive Web Apps] I still can’t say it, because you have to come back twice over two days. How popular would Clash of Clans be if you couldn’t install it until the second day you played it, I wonder?
[Note that since Stuart wrote this, the criteria for “engagement” by a user in a site changed from twice in two days into twice, at least 5 minutes apart.]
I think there should be a mechanism for discreetly unspammily alerting a user that a site is a Progressive Web App on first visit. But I’m not King of Opera for Android; however, I know the man who is (Andreas Bovens).
But how good are Progressive Web Apps, anyway? Is it even possible to write a really good app using web technology without the Reactembengular Framework?
I am super excited about this app, because it demonstrates that you can build an offline, 60FPS mobile app using *only* web technologies. Of course it’s offline-first (PouchDB, LocalForage, ServiceWorker, Cloudant), so you can browse all your fav Pokémon without a connection.
I’m super excited, too. Soon, this will be possible on all three cross-platform browsers. It’s also possible to add tell an app to be homescreen-able in iOS. No news from Microsoft, but they’re doing good things with the W3C Manifest in their manifold.js.
Want some web standards retro fun? Go to this Inbox Attack game in Opera for Android, add it to homescreen (the + button in the URL bar) and then tap its homescreen icon. It’s made with manifest, SVG and the vibration API.
If you’re interested in making a Progressive Web App, here are some resources to get you started.
Manifest Generator. It’s very possible that your site already has much of the information that the manifest format needs. This generator that I wrote with Stuart Langridge will spider your site and attempt to construct a manifest file you can download and deploy.
This week’s Golden Link: Service Worker Cookbook from Mozilla “is a collection of working, practical examples of using service workers in modern web apps”
Progressive Web Apps 30 minute video from Chrome Dev Summit session with Alex Russell (Google) and Andreas Bovens (my boss, Opera).
Manifest Generator by me and Stuart Langridge mentioned in the video above, that scours your site for metadata and tries to make a manifest that you can download. Beta!
Job ad: Senior User Experience Designer Opera’s looking for one to work on Opera for Android with my nice boss, Andreas Bovens. “While professional UX experience is required, talent and ambition are your best assets”. Tell ’em I sent you.
Interview with Gramneenphone CEO (the leading telecommunications service provider in Bangladesh) – “Although people in remote areas in Bangladesh still have no access to proper education and heath services, they are changing their lot just using internet as the power of internet is huge.”
The Day Google Deleted Me – I’ve endorsed Terence Eden on LinkTin for his wildly inventive swearing in this
Miss Amazing – a beauty pageant for women with disabilities “judged on their levels of self-confidence” (Nothing to do with web development, but I liked it)
For those who don’t know, “a11y” is short for “accessibility” the practice of ensuring web sites (and apps) are usable by people with disabilities.
Anyway, Heydon Pickering, a chum of mine from Bury St Somerset O’Groats in rural England, has collected some music made by people from the accessibility (and wider web standards) world, and is selling an album of it for3, all of which will go to two worthy causes: NVDA, a free open-source screen reader to help people with visual disabilities access the web, and Parkinsons UK.
The track list is pretty varied, from novelty to folk to psychedelia. There’s even a song by me on it, called Imprecise and Infrared, which Heydon described: “Your song has been stuck in my head 4 days out of 5 for the last four months, you catchy fuck.”
It would make a lovely Xmas prezzy, and owning it will make you (up to) 74 times more sexually desirable. So why not buy it?
A better paywall ecosystem with content passes – “There is declining but unfortunately still significant cohort of people who think all content “wants to be free or similar nonsense” by Andrew Betts
Number 6 in a series of poems I’ve been writing for 30 years. Amsterdam, October 2015.
Locked in this box
I have a seashell
that whispers to me
of white foaming surf and starfish,
of sirens and islands,
of sails and whales
and a voyage to see
a ballet of almond trees.
When there is no melody to be heard,
when this silence crushes,
I listen to my seashell
it reminds me how to sing.
And I can smell oysters and dead fish;
And I can hear the wind groaning in the rigging;
And I can touch seaweed slime and driftwood;
And I can taste salt spray on my lips.
Future of HTML – some soul-searching at W3C TPAC meeting on future of HTML5 spec vs WHATWG HTML Living Standard, and Steve Faulkner’s thoughts (on Medium; he’s so Thought-Leader)
Is Google usable? – an eye-opening usability lab video of a featurephone user’s first contact with the web, trying to type a search term into Google on a smartphone
Three years with CSS Grid Layout – self-appointed Grid Cheerleader Rachel Andrew writes on how the spec’s evolved as she’s waved her pompoms
The Web Payments Browser API– a proposal for an API that “enables web developers to register payment instruments (credit card, PayPal, Bitcoin, etc.), initiate requests for payment, and acknowledge requests for payment.
Internet browsing history – Freedom of Information request for “all websites visits made through parliamentary PCs made by MPs or their staff during the past 12 months.”
Here’s a video of a keynote talk I gave on Friday at Velocity Conference, Amsterdam. It was my last conference talk of the season, and the end of 4 weeks on the road.
I’m quite proud of it, for a number of reasons; firstly, because I was nearly sick with nerves but I look quite relaxed. (Look at how many people were there – and this is only half the room! Photo by Scott Jenson)
The second reason I’m pleased with it is because it explains why I (personally) do what I do. I was born in Yemen, lived in Africa and Asia and lament the Western-centricity of so many organisations, which manifests in their websites. It took a great deal of research, but it was worth it – some of the numbers, demographics and facts startled many audience members, and made a fair few of them realise that it truly is a worldwide web, not a wealthy western web.
Many people came up and expressed shock at the image of the true size of Africa. When people hear that the United Nations predicts the population of Africa will increase from its 1 billion now to 2 billion by 2050 and peak at 5 billion in 2100, they have visions of some Malthusian mass-starvation catastrophe. But, because of the Mercator Projection, few realise how damn big Africa is. For a fascinating and encouraging look at population trends, I thoroughly recommend Dr Hans Rosling’s 1 hour presentation Don’t Panic The Facts About Population. It’s entertaining, evidence-driven and deeply, deeply humane.
Here’s a song I started writing in Pokhahra, Nepal, under a skyline dominated by the Annapurnas (hence the Nepalese temple bell sample), while thinking about childbirth: how the delivery of my kids felt like a miracle, yet it’s so commonplace – millions of babies are born every year.
Then I thought about the unconditional love one has for one’s kids, and then the ordinary miracle of feeling love for anyone. So it’s about all of that, and joy and sorrow, related hippie bollocks, and mountains too. I love the sea, and I love mountains.
The second verse was completed in March this year in Barcelona. I’d hoped to have it recorded and mixed before my friend had her baby, but a month of travel prevented mixing and he was born at the weekend. Hurray!
It’s for you, please don’t think twice.
No words are wasted in this offering;
Take it now; no sacrifice;
freeing me, it’s freely given.
These gifts won’t fade;
It’s renewed every day
This may seem commonplace and unremarkable –
it’s the ordinary miracle:
Mundane, banal and trivial;
Comic-fodder for the cynical.
I give my unconditional love to you.
I do.
I never saw a clearer moon
from the Annapurnas to the Pyrenees.
I hope you don’t learn too soon
that freedom that is granted doesn’t set you free.
This light will glow –
I hope you see it when you go.
It’s for you – hold out your hands.
I’ll waste no more words in this offering.
