Peter Gasston's blog on web development and technologies
Today’s Google I/O keynote introduced a new technology called Android Instant Apps. In a nutshell, Instant Apps displays a small, focused portion of an app when a user clicks on a related link — even if the app isn’t installed on their system. The example used in the keynote was the Buzzfeed Video app: when [ ]
Jeremy Keith wrote a (typically great) post about metacrap, the unneccesarily verbose and repetitive metadata in the head of web documents, that’s required for content to be more easily shareable across social media. I fully agree with his broad point — there’s an awful lot of crap in head — but there’s a flaw in his initial examples. It’s [ ]
Automated systems powered by new breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence will soon begin to have an impact on the web industry. People working on the web will have to learn new design disciplines and tools to stay relevant. Based on the talk “OK Computer†that I gave at a number of conferences in Autumn 2015. In [ ]
I wrote an article, The Changing Form of the Web Browser, for rehabstudio (my employer). It’s about the present and near-future of the web browser, in a market where the consumption of information and services is shifting. It’s quite a long piece, and necessarily broad for a non-technical audience, so there is perhaps a lack [ ]
Last week I wielded the mighty power of Twitter to say this: If you use an iPhone I feel a bit sorry for you, because you’re missing out on the really innovative stuff happening in mobile browsers. A few people asked me what I meant by that, perhaps thinking that I was criticising iPhones in [ ]
I have a shortcut to medium.com on the home screen of my Android phone. It’s there because I browsed the site a couple of times and Chrome’s app install banners prompted me to add it to my home screen, so I did. Some time later I launched the site from the shortcut icon and it [ ]
I find it fascinating to see the variance in browser use in the diverse regions of the world, and nowhere is that variance more apparent than in mobile web browsers. While in the West we may be used to Chrome and Safari being more or less the only game in town, elsewhere in the world [ ]
One of the emerging concepts that I’m fascinated and excited by is the Physical Web. If you haven’t heard of this, a brief and very coarse summary is that it’s the idea of transmitting URLs from beacon devices, commonly using low-energy Bluetooth (BLE). Current beacon schemes are largely based on Apple’s iBeacon protocol, which transmits [ ]
There are many future web stack features that I see as being vitally important to the long-term health of the web. These include extensible web projects such as web components and CSS Houdini, as well as the scripting capabilities in ES7 and beyond. These features give developers better tools, and more fine control and power. [ ]
Yesterday Google announced ‘Eddystone’, a new open Bluetooth beacon format which works on Android and iOS. I’ve been doing a bit of reading about it to understand the technology and its potential, and I put together a briefing note about it for my colleagues. I’m a believer in maximising returns on my content, so it [ ]