Last week I had the pleasure to take part in the first HTML5-IL meetup. If you are a front-end developer that live in Israel you should try and come to this group events. Lots of great developers, designers and others that share the same passion for the web. Great stuff. Unfortunately I didn’t have more then 30min for this new, hot, complicated topic. So I hope to have more time to cover some of the aspects during the next meetup. From the four main aspects we touched only on the first two: Continue reading
Category Archives: webdev
HTML5 APIs At Google Developer Group Haifa (Hebrew)
It was the first meeting of GDG Haifa at the technion. I gave the first talk about HTML5 (new) APIs that front-end developers should leverage. It was a good kick-off event and it seems that this group will produce many more quality events. You can check the demos and the slide at my project site.
Enjoy.
UX Drinking Game On Google Developers Live Israel (Hebrew)
Last week we have a great talk in Campus TLV during our work with startups. This time is was in hebrew… on UX and how startups should think on their MVP and the UX of it.
Enjoy.
Web Components On Google Developers Live Israel (Part 2)
Today, I covered web components a bit deeper then the last episode. Since it’s a new, hot, complicated and fun topic it should get more time, right? There are four main pieces that provide this technology. We touched only the first two. We spoke about templates (define a piece of markup that are inert but can be activated for use later). Think on a new object you are using out of your class definition. Then, we spoke about decorators – which apply templates to let CSS affect rich visual and behavioral changes to documents. Both ‘Custom elements‘ and ‘Shadow DOM’ will be on the next episode. Continue reading
GDL IL – HTML5 Game (In Hebrew)
This week in Google Developers Live Israel, we talked with Mor from zloof.co.il about his new HTML5 game that is ‘conquering’ new gamers in Israel. There are many demos that show us the power of the web and its readiness for gamers. We covered some of the aspects that might interest developers who wish to build their first HTML5 game. We spoke about IDEs (sublime text 2, eclipse, web storm, netbean), tools, Model-View frameworks and learn a bit from Mor’s experience. Continue reading
Building Better Mobile Web Apps
When we thinking on web apps and specially mobile web apps, we wish to make them smooth a responsive as possiable. The main problem is latency/network and luckily we have enough APIs in HTML5 to make sure we can achieve this goal. A good recent example is fastbook (yep… just like facebook but working FAST with HTML5). Here I’ll summaries some of the main points you wish to pay attention when you building your next amazing mobile web app. Start with ‘offline first’ (after all, you are on the right path with ‘mobile first’ already).
Coding
Offline First
- You should store all the main assets of your application. There are several APIs you can use:
- AppCache – for the main index.html page and all your JS, CSS code. You could also use it for images and other static data.
- Filesystem – You have an option to work with files: text and binary data. This is a great option for cases where you have a lot of images/mp3/videos etc’. In order to manage the work with files there is a great library – filer.js
- Storing state/data:
- localStorage – in
mostall mobile browsers. But it’s sync and give you only a simple key-value api. Continue reading
- localStorage – in
Web Components On Google Developers Live Israel (Part 1)
Today, in our weekly Google Developers Live Israel show we spoke about HTML5 and web component. It was a macro level overview on this new edge of front-end development. This new project is composed of a group of technologies that should help us (web developers) create moderan web apps using HTML, CSS and JS. They do this by allowing toolkit makers to encapsulate their widgets and UI elements as easily reusable components.
We covered the main players:
- Templates – We can think on it as a new HTML element. It allow us to inert chunks of clonable DOM that can be activated for later use (e.g MDV). You can think of it as objects you creating out of your class definition. This new ‘object’ can contain markup (=CSS) and script (=JS) so it’s much more powerful from the ‘just’ CSS that we have today. We can use it as a decorator to give new style and functionality to our custom (new) HTML element.
- Custom elements – which can be looked as our toolbelt when we are coming to build a new web app and we wish to reuse ‘wheels’ and not reinvent them. We showed how to create new HTML elements by expanding HTML’s existing vocabulary.
- Shadow DOM – It’s like the regular DOM you know (and love) but it’s down in the ‘shadows’ hidden from our eyes. It’s main goal is to give us encapsulations. It’s the glue that let us insert and work with our components. Think of a ‘tab’ component that you don’t need to ‘know’ about it’s style, functionality etc’. It will work for you and you can’t break it from your JS code because you forgot to use a namespace for your app logic.
- Mutation Observers – and how to watch for changes in the DOM in the most efficient way. Continue reading
GDL-IL On Bootstrap Chrome Extensions
This week we spoke with Alex Wolkov from extensionizr.com fame on Chrome extensions and how/when/why you should use them. During these 30min we covered these main points:
- What is it an extension? If you wish to add functionality to the web app/sites you like? Well, this is the way to do it while using your front-end knowledge (HTML, JS, CSS) to add features to web app/sites that you are working with.
- What about compatibility with other browsers? Crossrider.com (another startup from Israel) provide you wish this functionalty. We showed them in this GDL-IL Extension show
- What are the best tools? Continue reading
GDL Israel On Yeoman.io, AngularJS And Github Pages
In this week episode of GDL-IL we talked with Ran Tavory on his new conference and how he built its website. Here are the main topics we covered:
- Yeoman as the main built tool. We found out that is easy to start working with it. This powerful tool gives you a set of tools that any modern web developer should use. Yeoman is a robust and opinionated set of tools, libraries, and a workflow that can help you be more productive and use the best practices in modern web development. Give it a ride…
- AngularJS – To add the dynamic part for our site. It’s very interesting to see how Ran used google spreadsheets as his database in the cloud and with the add angular he fetch the data and update the content automatically.
- Github pages – As a free (and scalable) hosting service.
- Twitter Bootstrap – Because it is saving you a lot of ‘leg work’ by using this powerful css framework. Ran didn’t start with it… but once he saw that the site doesn’t look good on mobile, he jump on this wagon and luckily for him it worked.
- Google spreadsheet as a database and a simple database for our CMS in the cloud. Continue reading
Frontend Development Sources
Here are a few new/cool sources I’ve bumped into during last week events (and meetings). It is always a great fun to talk with developers and learn on new tools that they are using in order to do their work. If you have something interesting, please don’t be a stranger and let me know…
HTML5
- Wanna see what can WebRTC do for you? Check out this cool demo of moving html5 slides with your hand like Tom in “Minority Report”.
- Let your IE users enjoy the power of HTML5 with this new great tutorial that explain how to bind Chrome frame to your site. Continue reading
Ido Green 