Datastorm

Posted on February 13, 2012 by Mattias Rost

I used to be active myself in what is called the demoscene. This year there was a demoparty, which means a weekend of people getting together, and compete with different art productions. This particular demoparty, called Datastorm, focuses on oldschool machines, particularly the Commodore 64 and the Amiga. The recommended way to experience these productions is on real hardware. But to make it more easy to consume, you can sometimes find them on youtube.

Here is the winning contribution by Fairlight. Note that this is made running in realtime on a Commodore 64. To remind you, the C64 has a CPU of 1MHz (or 0.001GHz) and 64kb of memory (about 0.064Mb or 0.000064Gb).

Instagram’s secrets for lightning fast mobile app designs

Posted on December 6, 2011 by Mattias Rost

LikeW writes about a talk he went to given by Instagram’s Mike Krieger on there secrets of fast mobile app designs. I especially liked the point:

Mobile experiences fill the gaps while we wait. Nobody wants to wait while they wait. Mobile needs to be fast.

Plenty more in the post so go ahead and read!

Alex Gibson goes responsive and mobile first

Posted on October 31, 2011 by Mattias Rost

Alex Gibson is a talented web and mobile developer who shares my views on HTML5, mobile web development, and responsive design. In this post on his blog he gives a thorough run through of how he re-designed his web site. He went mobile first, responsive and explains, among other things, how he setup his media queries. Furthermore, he explains how he re-orders content of the page depending on the device, using CSS. The web page is pretty simple, but serves as a nice case study of a mobile first, reponsively web designed, HTML5 site.

Be sure to check out his blog at http://miniapps.co.uk/blog/.

Bret Taylor on Mobile Web and Native

Posted on October 24, 2011 by Mattias Rost

Here’s an interview from Web 2.0 with Bret Taylor, CTO and Brogrammer at Facebook. The interview is about Facebook’s mobile initiatives.

Facebook wants to be the App Discovery channel. There is a technology side and a business side of apps. The technology side is about choosing platforms for which to build your app and user experience. Facebook do not want to be the ones picking the platform but rather support an experience for all. The business side is about App Discovery, how a brand and app developer can get their app to their users. This is where Facebook can help, by offering a channel where app developers can get their users to spread their apps to their friends through e.g. the New Feed.

I think there is a lot of interesting things in his views on this and we have been knowing that App Discovery is gonna be huge since me and Lars Erik went to AppNation last year. When there are a million apps out there, how are you going to make sure users find yours, and how are users gonna find the one for them? I think Facebook might be a great platform for that. I too believe a lot in serendipity (as can be seen in several of the projects I’ve done over the last years like Push!Photo), and like Bret Taylor says: “Social means serendipity.”. When combining this with his technology statement that “Making a social app is making an app ubiquitously accessible.”, then I think it is easy to see that HTML5 will play an important role in getting all of that together.

Kerstin Thunberg goes Responsive

Posted on October 20, 2011 by Mattias Rost

Here is an example of a responsive web site made by my friend Viktor at We Made You Look. Simple, effective, based on wordpress.

Fitvids

Posted on October 10, 2011 by Mattias Rost

Embedding video in a responsive web design can be a hassle. With FitVids.js (via Think Vitamin) it is now a piece of cake. Check video below.

Web apps are like Lego

Posted on October 9, 2011 by Mattias Rost

Just read another example on how Web Apps are Like Lego. Not precisely in the same way I would use such an analogy, but an interesting one none the less. Basically Christian Heilmann, evangelist at Mozilla, used it to exemplify how when you build web apps it is easier to reuse components. However he also goes as far as saying that the web app makes a less optimal experience compared to a native app, but that it is compensated by the more rapid development, and the improved reach to more devices. I disagree with that, and hail that a properly designed mobile web app can ge beyond what a native app can do. Employing responsive design for more than layout but also functionality, one can create a context aware mobile experience, and a contextualized desktop viewing experience, all through one well thought out design. So, I agree that web apps can be seen as Lego, but I also think Lego can be more powerful, and more beautiful, than badly formed clay.

Responsive IMGs

Posted on September 29, 2011 by Mattias Rost

My friend Viktor at We Made You Look pointed me to this article at Cloud Four on Responsive IMGs. The article makes a case for what is the problem with IMG tags when doing responsive web design. What you want in a truly responsive web design when it comes to images, is to only load images of the size needed for the viewing display. Using IMG tags one can set the src attribute to the smallest possible image, and then through scripting change the src attribute to what ever is appropriate once the display size is known. For small screens this works well, however for bigger devices this slows the loading down as it has to do two requests (and loads) for each image (unless the script manages to change the src before the browser starts fetching the image). There are of course other techniques for responsive images, by for instance using CSS and media queries, but the article deals with the problems with the IMG tag specifically not other techniques. I prefer using media queries which to me makes most sense from a technology standpoint, but I agree it is far from ideal. However it is what is available now, and should therefore be used!

He goes on to start a discussion about what would be appropriate to future proof the IMG tag – i.e. what is needed in order to make sure responsive web designs also work for devices, screen sizes, and resolutions, that we do not know of yet. He makes his own list of what he believe is needed and encourage readers to add to it.

Cloud Four is an excellent blog on web and mobile development and design, and is definitely worth a visit!

How to choose between web and native

Posted on September 29, 2011 by Mattias Rost

Forbes has an article on how to choose between mobile web and native apps. It has a simple overview of pros and cons of the two, and what intermediate versions there are. Their claim is that it is more complicated than two ends of a spectrum, but you can choose in between. Most interestingly is what they name a dedicated web app

Dedicated web app, which is a mobile web site tailored to a specific platform or form factor, like the LinkedIn web app which was designed for Android and iOS, but not for other smartphones or feature phones.

as opposed to a generic mobile app “which are mobile web sites designed to match every web-enabled phone, like the Wikipedia mobile page.”. I have definitely gone for the dedicated web app more times than the generic mobile web app.

I agree in principle with their end points, which state that you should build whatever solution you decide on, on the data. Create an API for the data, and build the app to use the API. This is really just good development style, but can definitely help when building mobile (web) apps if you need to try different solutions later on. As some people advocate “web first, native second” (e.g. this guy), having the API and data in place, you have laid the ground work.

SlideShare goes HTML5

Posted on September 28, 2011 by Mattias Rost

SlideShare just ditched flash for HTML5. This is of course awesome for the sake of HTML5, but it is also awesome for the people using it. This means that it will work everywhere where there is a browser capable of HTML5 (i.e. any modern browser including mobile ones). Unfortunately they did not go responsive on this one, but have separate versions depending on the device (so far I’ve seen a desktop version and a mobile version, and the mobile version seems to be adapting to the screen size.) They explain the benefit of having a mobile web app instead of going native for mobile in their own words

If you send someone a link to a presentation and they have to download an app to view it, that’s not a pleasant user experience. We want presentations on mobile devices to be accessible to as many users as possible.

Another step away from native apps, and a step into the world of web apps.