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The new FT.com web app
We’ve got a website for that
Andrew Betts, Assanka
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THERE WAS THE WEB
In the beginning
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Great stuff about the web
• Openness
• Community ownership
• Interoperability
• Accessibility
• Freedom
• Universal access
• Low regulation
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WAP
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No content
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Great stuff about apps
• Ease of use*
*I'm only counting “information apps” developed for all mobile
platforms, so there are no development speed benefits and
hardware integration is unnecessary
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Over-scroll
to reload
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Swipe navigation
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Pinch to zoom
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No content
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Big, easy to read
buttons
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No content
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Bad stuff about apps
• Expensive to build for multiple platforms
– iOS, WebOS, WinPhone, Android, QNX, BBOS
• App Store fees
• Loss of control over customer data
• No control over distribution channel
promotion
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MAKE THE WEB AS EASY TO USE
AS AN APP?
Couldn’t we just…
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There is a video here
To view the video, visit
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTywh4QJWMM
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The challenges
• Layout
• Offline use
• Navigation and interaction
• Change of mindset (remember WAP?)
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Layout
• Flowed columns
• Content balancing
• Podcast player
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Flowed columns
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Flowed columns
Headline
Media
insert
Media
insert
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Adobe webkit fork
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Flowed columns
• CSS columns not good enough
• CSS3 Template Layouts would be awesome…
if anyone supported them
• Adobe webkit fork also awesome, but not in
iOS native webkit
• Solution we use: Measure the content and cut
it into positioned containers using JavaScript
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Content balancing
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Classifying devices by resolution
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Podcast player
• HTML5 Audio player
embeds podcast
content
• But we need audio to
continue playing after
navigating away
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Continuous play
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Navigation and interaction
• Swiping between sections
• Snapping article pagination
• Progress spinners
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Swiping between sections
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Swiping between sections
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WeinRE
pmuellr.github.com/weinre
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Snapping article pagination
• Overflowed content panel
• Touchscroll container with snapping
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Fastclick layer
• Touch is instant, click requires ~300ms linger
• Some taps are shorter
• 'Fastclick' layer to detect very brief taps,
convert to clicks.
• Used for devices that fire touch events
• Used eg for tapping through an article
• Disables interactions like double tap to zoom
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Offline access
• Launching the app offline
• Making text content available offline
• Storing content images offline
• Analytics
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Launching the app offline
• Ensure every resource the browser needs is in
the manifest
• Attach event listeners to manifest events to
allow progress feedback
• Manifest is atomic – download all or none
• Webkit manifest bug – obscure naming of the
manifest helps
• Set dynamic comment in manifest for dev
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Check resource requests
Charlesproxy.com
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Offline text content
• Manifest stores framework, ‘scaffolding’
• Need something else for editorial content
• IndexedDB is the emerging standard but not
supported by Safari
• Currently use SQLite
• Small database mode < 5MB
• Large mode requires consent for 50MB
• Use localStorage for index, as it's faster
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Offline images
• Editorial images – too many and too temporary to
put in manifest. But binary data from SQLite can't be
put in an IMG tag
• Solution: Download images as base64 encoded
strings
• Store in SQLite
• Render as data: URIs
– 
• Currently looking at File API
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Effects of using data URIs
• Operators don’t see images as images, so don’t
do nasty recompression
• Multiple images can be batched in one HTTP
response
• Response can be gzipped (resulting size is
comparable to size of original images)
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Analytics
• Can’t use Google Analytics etc offline
• Instead log user actions into SQLite
• POST the log when requesting updated content
• Server-side, convert into an Apache-format
access log
• Remember: logs are never definitive. Offline stats
are reported on a variable delay.
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Unresolved problems
• SSL indicator / padlock
• Social media integration
• Offline adverts
• Automated QA
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What have we learned?
• Ease of use is absolutely critical
• The web can deliver on this almost as well,
and in some cases, better, than native
• Web apps retain all the benefits of the web
that you give up when building native apps
• So don’t build native apps. Build web apps!
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Questions?
• Andrew Betts
• andrew.betts@assanka.net
• You should follow me on twitter here:
@triblondon
• Assanka is hiring (assanka.net/jobs)