Book Image

Offline First Web Development

By : Daniel Sauble
Book Image

Offline First Web Development

By: Daniel Sauble

Overview of this book

When building mobile apps, it’s easy to forget about the moments when your users lack a good Internet connection. Put your phone in airplane mode, open a few popular apps, and you’ll quickly see how they handle being offline. From Twitter to Pinterest to Apple Maps, some apps might handle being offline better—but very few do it well. A poor offline experience will result in frustrated users who will abandon your app, or worse, turn to your competitor’s apps Expert or novice, this book will teach you everything you need to know about designing and building a rigorous offline app experience. By putting the offline experience first, you’ll have a solid foundation to build upon, avoiding the unnecessary stress and frustration of trying to retrofit offline capabilities into your finished app. This basic principle, designing for the worst-case scenario, could save you countless hours of wasted effort.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Offline First Web Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Configuring the development tools


There are three tools that we will use in most of the examples: a text editor for the coding, a browser (preferably Chrome) to run and debug your app, and the command line to run the web server and execute commands. Let's walk through each of these tools.

A text editor

If you have an existing editor that you like, use that. In this book, I will use Sublime Text 3. You can download a free evaluation of Sublime for OS X, Windows, and Linux. If you prefer to use a free editor, good choices include Notepad++ (Windows), Bluefish Editor (OS X and Linux), and GVIM (Linux). To install Sublime, follow these instructions:

  1. Open www.sublimetext.com in your browser.

  2. Click on Download.

  3. Click on Sublime Text 3.

  4. Choose the appropriate version for your operating system.

  5. Wait for the download to complete and run the installer.

You should be able to run Sublime now. It's a GUI-based editor that is very intuitive and simple to use. If you're interested in getting more out of Sublime...