My leg of the Google Developer Day tour is almost over, and it’s been AWESOME! Wow! Not only have I now visited 6 out of 7 continents (anyone know of any conferences or events in Antartica - it’s the only one left I’ve not been to), but I was able to add Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires to the list of cities that I need to come back and visit while on vacation. I’ve been thoroughly impressed with all of the developers here who showed me some of the really cool stuff that they’re working on. I presented two...
Well, hopefully it’ll be near you - if not, let me know in the comments where you are so we can try to get some more of these events set up! Google is holding a few developer focused hack-a-thons around the US and would like to invite you to attend. At these events, we will be covering some of the latest and greatest features of HTML5, Chrome Web Store and In-App Payments. You will learn about the end to end flow of building a web app, distributing the app and monetizing it using these APIs. You will also...
While on my way into work this morning, I read a post on SixRevisions asking the question “Is It Time To Rethink Website Navigation?” For a very long time, navigation on websites has been stagnant, it’s either a navbar across the top, or maybe down the side. Sometimes, with a little JavaScript, it’s interactive, but it almost always contains the same types of link. The logo almost always takes you “home”, there’s an about link, a site index link, contact us, well, you know what I’m talking about. Oh, and...
What makes a web application great? I recently sat down with Christos, one of the guys on my team to look at a number of the top web applications in the Chrome Web Store to try to identify which ones were really great, versus good, and what advice we could give to the good apps to become “great”. Before we could start rating these apps, we built out a set of principles and criteria that we felt were important in providing a great application experience on the web. We based our principles on some earlier...
Your first chance to make a great impression with a new user is often on your application listing page in the Chrome Web Store. People will make a split second decision whether to install your application based on what you put on there, so it’s important to make a great first impression. Let’s take a look at what makes a great Chrome Web Store application listing. This guide highlights a couple key components of a great Chrome Web Store listing. I tried not to repeat content from the documentation, but...
How often have you seen this dialog, or something similar - telling you that some scripts on a page are taking too long while your browser has become completely unresponsive. Because JavaScript runs in the same thread as the rest of the browser UI, we’re often faced with the challenge of being unable to run any complex or long running JavaScript without the fear of blocking the browser. That’s where web workers come in. Web Workers are part of the HTML5 specification and allow you to run scripts in the...