It was great to give a swift tour of Progressive Web Apps for the lovely people at BathCamp last thursday. Here are the slides and an outline of what we went through.
A few things have changed
We now know …
Most people only install apps when they buy their phone
Most people only use common apps and no other
The web platform has now got APIs for previously native-only features
Let’s consider a few situations
The train journey
Content doesn’t know about network service
Speed
Intermittent
Offline
I use this every day
Home screen visibility and easy access is important
I’ve recently been working with a luxury car brand on some HTML5 goodness and it’s reminded me to write about a very useful technique used a lot in game programming but often forgotten about when building creative websites and apps.
When you have a number of large images which need to be rapidly switched between or drawn you will very quickly see memory usage going through the roof. We were seeing around 900MiB of memory being eaten up in a second. The first optimisation is to make sure the images are of an appropriate size. In our case the images within the content were being displayed at 394px wide but were originally 1536px wide.
I feel like I’ve been in my little hole for months now … oh yeah it has been, since October! I’ve been beavering away in my evenings building a simple idea:
I’m a music fan, how can I collect and remember the gigs I’ve been to?
Together with Gordon Duncan who came up with the original idea I have been building GigStamp.
The check-in app for music fans
The app is really very simple on the surface. It finds you at a gig, you choose some stamp artwork, add a message and boom … you have your stamp.
Dave Taylor - Software Engineer
