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...
In TweeterFall, when a new tweet is received, we notify the user about that tweet via desktop notifications. If you use Chrome and Gmail, you’ve probably seen notifications pop up when you receive a new mail, or about an upcoming appointment. The Desktop Notifications API allows script to request a small toast to appear on the desktop of the user. The contents of the toast can either be specified as iconUrl/title/text strings, or as a URL to a remote resource which contains the contents of the toast. ...
I want to devote some time to how Ernest and I built TweeterFall, the demo that we used for our I/O Boot Camp presentation last week. Instead of showing isolated demos of some of the new HTML5 features, we wanted to show how you might use some of these things in real world scenarios, and thus we built TweeterFall. TweeterFall is a Twitter visualizer that grabs the tweets from a list and shows them in a kind of waterfall like visualization. What did we use to build TweeterFall? HTML5 Semantics # We used...
Last week at I/O Boot Camp, Ernest Delgado and I presented a session titled Getting Started with HTML5. Rather than take folks through the laundry list cool new stuff that’s part of HTML5, we took them through a smaller subset of features, showing how we used them in a real world application - TweeterFall. You can watch the video, check out the slides and try TweeterFall. When trying the slides, be sure to try them in Chrome dev, Canary or Safari to get the full 3D...