Blog by Nolan Lawson about JavaScript on mobile devices
(Yes, this post is about JavaScript. Please indulge the analogy for a bit.) Imagine yourself as a young court composer in the 18th century. You've just arrived in Vienna, fresh from the academy, with one goal in mind: to improve your craft, and to learn from the old masters. You've heard the stunning operas of Mozart, the ponderous fugues of Bach, and you've dreamed of wowing audiences with your…
The mobile web has a bad reputation these days. Everyone agrees it's slow, but there's no shortage of differing opinions on how to fix it. Recently, Jeff Atwood argued convincingly that the state of single-threaded JavaScript on Android is poor . Then Henrik Joretag questioned the viability of JavaScript frameworks on mobile altogether , saying that tools like Ember and Angular are just too…
Back in 2012, when Facebook famously ditched HTML5 for fully native apps, the main problem they cited was a lack of smooth scrolling: “This is one of our most important issues. It’s typically a problem on the newsfeed and on Timeline, which use infinite scrolling. [...] Currently, we do all of the scrolling using JS, as other options were not fast enough (because of implementation issues).” —…
For JavaScript to be an attractive tool for mobile developers, it's not enough for it to offer a good developer experience. It also has to offer a good user experience. The UI should feel spry and peppy. Animations should zip. Screens should respond immediately to the user's touch. If there's a reason people love their phones so much , it's because mobile apps are very good at delivering on these…
Working on the Squarespace Blog app for Android , one of the biggest challenges is that the app is half-native, half-web. My job is to make sure you can't tell which is which. Spoiler alert. While trying to achieve this goal, one of the first things I learned is that animations with native-level performance – i.e. animations that don't stutter, jerk, or lag – can only be achieved with…
I decided to start a new blog, about a subject that's become very fascinating to me: JavaScript on mobile devices. For a long time, the web platform has lagged behind native apps in terms of performance and functionality. However, as 2015 dawns, I think we're rapidly approaching a time when it will be viable, if not standard practice, to choose tools like JavaScript, HTML, and CSS over tools like…