Reading List
My first reading list after 3 months backpacking around India. Some of the links were in draft since before I went, so you may have seen them before. Om Boomshanka.
- Golden link of the week: How we built Twitter Lite – new Progressive Web App that is “fast and responsive, uses less data, takes up less storage space, and supports push notifications and offline use in modern browsers. The web is becoming a platform for lightweight apps that can be accessed on-demand, installed without friction, and incrementally updated. Over the last year we’ve adopted new, open web APIs and significantly improved the performance and user experience”. It’s explicitly a play for emerging markets/ India.
- Android overtakes Windows for first time – “Milestone in technology history and end of an era as Microsoft no longer owns dominant OS
- Year-long study of first-time low-income smartphone owners in Kenya (shame the main report is a PDF)
- AMP: breaking news – Andrew Betts, Technology consultant at the Financial Times and member of W3C TAG, writes “If you want an independent news industry that produces quality, accurate, accessible content, we need to incentivise accuracy, not virality, and maintain creator-control over distribution.”
- Mobile web: back to the future – “Facebook launched its Instant Articles format, Google launched AMP … And thus here we are, WAP to the future”
- Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee slams UK and US net plans – Timbo “attacked any UK plans to weaken encryption and promised to battle any moves by the Trump administration to weaken net neutrality”.
- CSS Grid Garden – “Welcome to Grid Garden, where you write CSS code to grow your carrot garden!”
- Grid “fallbacks and overrides by Rachel “Firebush” Andrew
- Does CSS Grid Replace Flexbox? (TL;DR: No.)
- rems and ems and why you probably don’t need them – a good fun rant but PX, EM or REM Media Queries? is more nuanced and concludes “the only unit that performed consistently across all four browsers is em”. Pattypoo Lauke also concludes “it’s not a complete deal breaker to set sizes of things in pixels. that’s a conscious choice you’d make as a developer, knowing the reason for why it may also still not be a good idea depending on your audience etc”.
- Related: Questioning Container Queries – “container queries appear to be yesterday’s answer to today’s problems.”
- Reactive Web Design: The secret to building web apps that feel amazing – TL;DR: show skeleton screens to improve perceived performance, specify image sizes in HTML to stop screens jumping round when images load
- Simple Little Use Case for `vmin`
- WhatsApp will reportedly launch peer-to-peer payments in India within 6 months – “claims that WhatsApp plans to use UPI, a cross-bank payment system backed by the government, to begin enable payments between users within the next six months”. If true, this is big.
- The broken promise of Web Components – “Web Components are more of the same regular DOM API. What I like to think of it is: it standardized the worst practices.” and an excellent response by Rob Dodson (Google).
- Incubate All the Things by Brian “Extensible” Kardell
- The Dark Side of Polyfilling CSS – Phillip Walton on the problems Houdini will solve
- How much data should my Service Worker put upfront in the offline cache? by Nicholas Hoizey
- Nokia Android phone spurns the West – “premium design” launching in China,200
- A 2017 Wishlist for Progressive Web Apps and Mobile Web by PWA pioneers, Flipkart
- TypeScript: the missing introduction
- Differences between ARIA 1.0 and 1.1: Additions to role’
- The digital reinvention of an Asian bank – it’s not enough to apply digital “lipstick.
- 4 Things I learned Designing User Interfaces for VR at Disney
- The ad tech renaissance – “The end of impressions and banners in favor of views and “publisher rendered” (aka native) creative.”
- The mind-blowing AI announcement from Google that you probably missed
- The impact of phone mast technology on a remote Congolese town in pictures
Buy "Calling For The Moon", my debut album of songs I wrote while living in Thailand, India, Turkey. (Only £2, on Bandcamp.)