jan korbel

I wanted to share five paragraphs of customer support conversation I’ve had with the rest of the team (two other guys). As I’ve IMed with one of the guys few minutes ago, I automatically went for the IM window. But first thing that stopped me was I remembered that sometimes the IM does not send longer messages. So I am thinking: “OK, there has to be some better way.”

Then it clicked: “Oh, wait, this is the sort of thing we have Basecamp account for!” And that led me to realizing one obvious disadvantage of abstract software.
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Quite a thorough review.

Via @michalillich

Free Web User Interface Kit.

Think of it as a WordPress template but for your next web application.

Native views and web views are good at different things.
Native is good for high fidelity interaction, animations, responding to gestures. However the native APIs are bad for designing “documents” — that is, layouts where elements flow within a container and push each other around. That means that things that are extremely easy on the web can be painstaking in native UI without much upside.
Web views have limited interactivity, but they have other advantages:
* Faster iterations. You don’t need to push a build when a webview changes.
* Document-style layout, as mentioned above.
* Higher density. We found it easier to show more information on the screen with HTML/CSS than the native controls. Looking at other apps out there makes me think it’s an attribute of the medium, not just us.
* No need to sync data or duplicate logic. Sending HTML down the pipe is simple.
Finally yes, we get the multi-platform advantages because the web views are also served to people who hit the regular mobile web version of the app without any wrapper.

— Hacker News

Via @keff85

If you are in the business of building anything for users, you must watch this. For those of you who know her “Creating the passionate users” talk, this is an updated version of the theme.

Via @paveldolezal & @davegreiner

Free and open source.

You may try the webapp and read how they made it.

Via @keff85

Kendo UI blog:

HTML5 takes another huge step forward with Chrome Packaged Apps. Packaged Apps open-up the desktop to HTML5 developers. Reusing all of the skills mastered for the web and mobile, Packaged Apps empowers developers to create complete app experiences that can be run anywhere you find Chrome: Windows, Mac, Linux, and, of course, Chrome OS!

These apps do not run in a “browser.” They run as independent, standalone apps with their own shell. Chrome powers the entire experience, but for users, Packaged Apps are not a browser experience. They’re an app experience.

Definitely worth a look.

I was fortunate enough to get to talk at Future of Web Apps + Future of Web Design double conference in Prague. First, I would like to thank to Future Insights (previously Carsonified) and personally to Cat Clark for the trust in me to give me the speakers wild card.

Bellow are my slides and complete text of my 30 minutes speech. I spoke from memory so I have probably digressed on a few places. Also, please, forgive any typos or grammatical errors I’m basically posting my notes and I had no time to do thorough proofreading.

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In an article “A Trillion-Dollar Transfer Of Wealth Is About To Hit Silicon Valley” Dan Lyons writes something I happen to be in agreement with for last 6 years:

Enterprise customers have been locked into overpriced, underperforming software and equipment for a decade or more, and the’ve been loath to spend money to change things. But now it seems a huge transformation is about to occur, driven by mobile devices, cloud platforms and the software-as-a-service business model.

But his vision is too narrow. This is not just about building better products against SAP or Microsoft. This is about opening whole new market niches which couldn’t be approached before. Ultimately it will be about more than trillion dollars.

Coincidentally, I will be speaking about this next week at FOWA in Prague.

Over 800 pages if you are interested.

Jetstrap may be useful.

Via @jakubspanihel

Article worth reading by Rob Banagale.

Positioning your HTML5 mobile web developer as the primary domestique (flanked by UX design and UI design) is the best way to cut through the “wind resistance” of developing for multiple mobile platforms.

Last month Bidsketch had the biggest increase in revenue it’s ever had.

Ruben Gamez then goes on into describing how he find out to which segments he could divide his clients and how he should present the new plans and much more.

Just read it.

Via @daeltar

Online mobile interface prototyping tool. Even if you are not in it, just try it to see what an HTML5 web app could do.

Mr. Matteo Spinelli created nice add-to-home-screen script that may be useful to you if you have a mobile web app and want to let your users know, they could add it to their home screens.
That then allows your app to look like native app from their point of view.

The application cache manifest (ACM) offers developers a way to make their apps work offline, reduce bandwidth consumption, and load pages much faster. Local storage and WebSQL databases are also great ways to cache data on the client side, and this post will talk about the pros and cons of using each.

Great overview of the topic by JT Mudge for Six Revisions.

Obviously, it’s hard to be objective in this sort of comparison, because some strengths could quickly turn into weaknesses for your given app and vice versa.

Nonetheless, this comparison, at the very least, puts your thinking in the right frame.

Moqups is a nifty HTML5 App used to create wireframes, mockups or UI concepts, prototypes depending on how you like to call them.

Mandrill is a new way for apps to send transactional email. It runs on the delivery infrastructure that powers MailChimp.

We are currently using Postmark and it works great but as the job-to-be-done here is quite well defined and the APIs are reasonably simple, I’m sure it will be race to the lower price pretty quickly for these guys.

I like the modularization of the web application infrastructure we are seeing being build. And one has to wonder: What will be the inevitable integration about?