Last week, I’ve went to live person HQ to give a talk in ILTechTalks on HTML5 and how you can use some of its new APIs in order to build you next web app. Today, web apps like: gmail, maps, google docs etc’ are consider to be modern web apps. They are rich, interactive applications that users spend long hours with them. There are few features that distinguish modern (or great) web apps from sites: Continue reading
Tag Archives: GDL-IL
GDL-IL on Chrome Extensions And Backbone.js In The Real World
Today I’ve spoke on GDL-IL (=Google Developer Live Israel) with Ron Reiter on his work at Any.Do and how he leverage backbone.js to create this useful chrome extension. The main points we covered during our talk:
- Chrome Extensions– How you start developing them and why you will want to do it.
- Extensions are small software programs that can modify and enhance Chrome. The best part is that you write them using web technologies such as HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS. Here is the code for the example extension I’ve wrote as ‘short cuts’ to Chrome internal pages.
- Ron gave us a short description on backbone.js and what are the main components in this MV* framework. You can learn more at: http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/
- We talked about Any.do extension and Ron gave a nice overview of the code he used for the sync layer.
- Few tips for extensions developers:
- How to inspect an extension: open the popup and right click inside of it. It will give you the option to open chrome devtools (with the ‘inspect element menu item). In cases, where you don’t have a popup – you can always use chrome://extensions and click on ‘inspect background page’.
- If you have some logic you wish to test without the extension (or not inside it) you can always run QUnit (or any other unit test framework) on a page that will be a proxy to your popup’s index.html file.
- How to inspect an extension: open the popup and right click inside of it. It will give you the option to open chrome devtools (with the ‘inspect element menu item). In cases, where you don’t have a popup – you can always use chrome://extensions and click on ‘inspect background page’.
Enjoy and feel free to join us every week on WED 14:00 Israel time at https://developers.google.com/live/
Special GDL-IL On Startups #tips
It is a busy week (and we are only on TUE). First, we had the opportunity to host four founders from around the world (Sweden, Moscow and Israel) on GDL-IL. It was in a special episode about: Sartups, VCs, Angles and how to improve your pitch. I had the pleasure to host Eze Vidra, Head of Google Campus London who gave important feedback after each pitch. The structure of the show was like that: each founder got 3 minutes to pitch his startup and then we gave them feedback and asked more questions in order to understand the strengths better. I liked the fact that each founder choose a different way to pass his message. It was very interesting to hear the progress and learn about the key accomplishments that each of them made. I will write a more detailed summary of this conversation but for now you can enjoy it over here:
Second, last night, fresh from the oven a new podcast in hebrew on HTML5 and CSS3 New & Cool Stuff saw life. I had the honor to be a guest (again) on reversim.com and talk about new web technologies that I’m passion about. If you are a developer that wish to hear quality content in hebrew on subjects that relate to your profesional life. Give it a try, today they have more then 150 episodes that cover A LOT of topics. You can download the mp3 file from here.
The New Chromebook And New DevTools Tips
Let’s start with some cool features you should use in Chrome DevTools:
- Device emulation – You can set a new User Agent so your web app will think you are now access it from a mobile phone/tablet etc’. This is a great feature that used to be something you needed to use a Chrome extension in order to have.
- Dimension overriding – This is very cool because it let developers debug mobile web apps on different devices and operating systems via the Settings Menu. You can emulate the exact device metrics of many devices (e.g. iPad/iPhone, Galaxy Nexus/Tablets and even BB) so your media queries will run without any bugs.
- Touch event emulation to make it easier to debug mobile applications on the desktop. Of course, you can have other simulators (e.g. Android and iOS) but here you have it inside Chrome!
- If you wish to play with the latest and greatest features that are under ‘experiments’. You should go to: chrome://flags/ and click ‘Enable’ on: ‘Enable Developer Tools experiments’ then in the setting panels of the devtools you will have more granular control on the specific feature you wish to use. For more checkout the official page of chrome developer tools.
You can watch the 10min episode on our GDL-IL page.
As you all know, last week we had the launch of the new Chromebook for everyone. I’m really existed about this new device because it’s a combination of cheaper (249$ on amazon), better (lots of improvements + important security capabilities), faster (well, lighter). Some of the interesting specs are:
- 11.6’’ screen
- 0.7 inches / 2.42 pounds
- 6.5 hours of battery (I had it running for more then 8h – but maybe, it because I was working mostly with email/docs and cloud 9 and not watching movies).
- Boots up in less than 10 seconds
- 100 GB of Google Drive free for 2 years – Yep, 100G.
You can test the water with it on several locations in the US (e.g Best Buy) and ‘feel’ it. I can say that in the past months I’ve worked with a very close model and it was a great device. If you ‘live’ in the cloud and do not need photoshop (like 99% of the internet users) it might be a device you want to checkout. As web developers, if you are using a cloud IDE (e.g. like one from this list) It might be very good option.
The Chromebook for everyone
Compare the new device to his ‘older’ brother
I had an urge to do the same video but then I’m notice this one… so here you go. It’s cover the major differences in terms of the hardware. As for the OS and the new features in Chrome… It’s the same (of course).
IndexedDB Webcast In GDL-IL
Here is a short webcast that shows how to build “IndexedDB in a jQueryMobile app”. If you thought about building a modern web application with offline capabilities, it will be a good 101 session for you. For the full code you can read “How to use indexedDB” and here is a live demo of this mobile web app. It seems that with the JavaScript shim that I’m using this is a nice solution for developers that wish to target both Android and iOS as it should work in both Chrome for android and mobile safari. Moreover, soon when IE10 will be in the ‘wild’ web, indexedDB API will be available in Chrome, FF and IE, nice ahh?
Btw, one of the reader of the blog point me to another open source IndexedDB API wrapper library – From browsing it, it’s looking good!
GDL IL With The SubDroid Team
A short discussion with the team that built the first SubDroid that sink in Sedot Yam!
Some good topics on Android, Hackathons and design aspects for successful GeekCon project.
As always, if you have 20-25min on WED at 14:00 Israel time… mark your calendars and join us live on GDL-IL!
Google Drive on GDL IL
Here is my talk from last week with Nicolas Garnier (Developer Advocate for Google Drive) on the new aspects of Drive. You can have a short intro to drive and then dive into:
- What are the key features developers should be aware of when working with Drive APIs. For example: all the Drive SDKs you can use with your favorite technology (e.g. Java, Php, Python etc’).
- Show some new apps that are doing good job in integrating into Drive. We spoke about best practices and OAuth2.0
- Learn what is next for drive in the near future…
Psst…
If you want to see more GDL-IL episodes, feel free to ‘Add our show‘ to your calendar. It’s going to take 15-25min of your time every WED at 14:00 Israel time (IST)
Google Developers Live IL And Shana Tova!
Today we lunch GDL IL. What is it? Google developer live is GDL and IL is our famous short for Israel. It is going to be a weekly show on WED 14:00 (so mark your calanders please). We are going to talk about the latest and greats news in technology. From Android to HTML5 and back to Cloud, Google APIs and anything that is interesting for developers. As ‘startup nation’ we will hosts some of the cool, interesting/amazing startups that will tell their story and will share some of their real life experience. For the first show that is focus around Chrome extensions, I had a pleasure to interview Tal from Equire (a CRM Chrome extension that integrates with Gmail and making your life better). We talked about the life of a web developer that choose to build a product in Chrome (extension and/or App). Since Tal is working from The Hub we covered what is unique about this ‘working space’ and how to be productive in such an environment. One of the key questions I’ve asked was something like: “What are the top 5 things to keep in mind when we are coming to build a chrome extension?” Tal answered:
- Don’t rush to do the same things you always do when first building an app, think about the new architecture, understand it, it’s a different mindset, it’s not just a regular web app. The major difference is the limited ‘screen’ you have and some strong APIs – so use it smartly.
- LocalStorage… give you a lot of power to save state/data of users.
- Metrics – measure everything so you could improve over time and give more insight to your users.
- APIs – There are many APIs that are available only inside Chrome so learn them and use them!
- Very challenging UX issue – not a blank canvas like a web app. You have an option to give notifications and be ‘infront of your users’ but there is a delicate balance to strike to make sure you don’t get uninstalled.
There are many more things we covered… Some of these are covered in this post “Six Strategies for building great extensions“. However, if you want all the good stuff, you will need to watch it until the end when our next week guest will show up 😉
We finish the episode with 3 things/tools that Tal recommend.
- Mixpanel – An analytic tool that answer any question you have about your code/users. You should start early and get a feel for it. The nice part is that you do not need any backend.
- CoffeeScript – take a week, learn it, it will give you back 3 months of your year.
- Backbone – especially for chrome extensions. It was a simple for Tal to start and be productive with it.
Until next time… Enjoy and Shana Tova!
Ido Green 