Can we had a better title for our talk? I’m not sure… But the description was along the lines of “…Ready to rock the world with your next application? Odds are you are thinking about mobile, web and the cloud.” So far… so good.
In this session we talked about building a modern mobile web application that takes advantage of the Google Cloud Platform. We touch on the powerful combination of the “mobile web AND the cloud” and in the process we tried to show the power of Google cloud endpoints and modern HTML5 apis. We built a fun little mobile web app “Pictureque” that give you the options to take photos (even on airplanes) and then share them with the world. Continue reading →
Today, I had the pleasure to sit for 15min with Nissim Betito (the one and only!) how is a known hacker in the linux community around TLV. We spoke about Chromebook and what are the powerful tools that you can leverage today when you wish to write code. Later, we showed how to install ubuntu on Chromebook and get everything you miss as a developer that must have gcc (or other complier) under their hands. In the near future we will show how to install chromeOS image on raspberry pi… Continue reading →
Today we had the pleasure to host Shai Reznik and talk with him on his true passion – AngularJS. Few of the hot topic we covered in this episode where:
Data binding is an automatic way of updating the view whenever the model changes, as well as updating the model whenever the view changes. This is awesome because it eliminates DOM manipulation from your todo list and it’s making sure to work efficiently with zero effort on your part.
Directives – How you can use today ‘Web components’ and see how it will be (fun and productive) to develop in the web platform in the near future.
Dependency Injection – Why it’s a powerful concept and how it can help you with managing large scale web apps and your testing.
Module – We spoke about the community around this framework and one of the by products is the modules that extend the options of which APIs and web services you can use directly from Angular. Continue reading →
Web Workers is a good way to improve the performance of your web applications. It’s not a new HTML5 API but for some reason not too many front end developers are using it. This short episode will give you the intro to why and how you can leverage this simple and powerful API to enter the world of multi threads in the browser. Continue reading →
This time it’s a 5min talk that comedian Don McMillan (more good stuff over his site) did back in 2008. It’s still very relevant with great tips on what NOT to do. Some points I took while watching him:
Less is more – reduce the amount of text on the slides to the minimum. Make sure you have an amazing slides (ya… get quality photos with the wow effect) that drive to the point you wish people to take from each slide. Images trigger emotion and since you wish to tell a story (and not flip slides) images are your friends.
If we touch the main point of ‘story telling‘, let’s go on it deeper because it’s (one of )the most important aspects. You want to tell an interesting story, provoke emotion and leave the audience with ‘something’ after you done talking. Most importantly, do NOT read what you wrote on the slides.
Reduce the amount of slides/text so the most important ideas will get the focus.
Blink? Well, it’s a new rendering engine for Chromium with a big mission statement: “To improve the open web through technical innovation and good citizenship”
Why is Chrome spawning a new browser engine?
There are two main reasons:
The main reason is that Chromium uses a different multi-process architecture than other WebKit-based browsers. So, over the years, supporting multiple architectures has led to increasing complexity for both the WebKit and Chromium communities, slowing down the collective pace of innovation.
In addition, this gives an opportunity to do open-ended investigations into other performance improvement strategies. We want web applications to be as fast as possible. So for example, we want to make as many of the browser’s duties run in parallel (think iframes!), so we can keep the main thread free for your application code. We’ve already made significant progress here, for example by reducing the impact JavaScript and layout has on page scrolling, and making it so an increasing number of CSS animations can run at 60fps even while JavaScript is doing some heavy-lifting.
In our GDL-IL today, I’ve talked about a fun project I did in the past. It’s a single web page application that let you manage an event. We covered some of the basic components we used in order to built this site and then we jumped into the app script code and showed how to work with the online IDE that let you write, run and debug your server side code. The site gives you basic functions like: Continue reading →
At the beginning of the year, I’ve worked with a big organization that wanted to avoid the automatic suggestions Chrome is making in the omnibox (=the top field in Chrome, where you type searches and see the url).
Their main requirement was the need to allow employees to type a word and get the internal site that they are use to see. For example, the user will type ‘sale’ and Chrome will redirect them to the internal portal of sales. If you won’t modify Chrome it will run a google search on ‘sale’ and the results will be something like:
The good news is that with this little extension you will be able to control the redirect of the users to the right internal location. Let’s jump into code.
This is the code of our manifest file that describe the extension
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Important to notice is that we setting the keyword ‘get’ in order to activate this extension. You can choose something shorter if you like. Another aspect is the “manifest_version”: 2 which making sure we are compatible with the latest spec.
This is the code of our background page
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Here we will listen to the events of omnibox.onInputChanged and omnibox.onInputEntered in order to execute our logic.
Another point you might want to consider is to go to:
chrome://settings/ -> Advanced -> and then to disable these options:
Use a web service to help resolve navigation errors
Use a prediction service to help complete searches and URLs typed in the address bar
Predict network actions to improve page load performance
It doesn’t matter if you are working in a startup of few people or a big organization with 2.2M employees (e.g. Walmart). In both cases, you probably have internal network and internal systems that your users will love to access with few keywords like: CRM, ERP, Sale, Marketing, QA etc’.
This is the talk I did in Google Developers Live Israel. It’s a weekly show that we have every WED at 14:00 (Israel time). You are most welcome to hangout with us in the future and ask questions or comments on anything that is related to startups, technology and (of course) Chrome/HTML5.
In the past 18 years I’ve started six companies (the last cool one is HighGearMedia). In this talk, I shared some of the best practices that I learned the hard way. There are few aspects that I did my best to covered, from technology to design to following your dreams with the best tools you can allow yourself in a certain point in time. In the slides, there is a section that is devoted to Campus TLV and what is the role (as I see it) of a mentor that works with startups on a daily bases. If you are going to visit the Campus in the future, please don’t be a stranger.
There are many more aspects for building a new company. I guess, one of the most critical success factor is finding the right partners and share the load of the work. It’s one of those ‘easy to say hard to do’ things but this is part of the fun.