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

The online/offline transition


Now that we've designed the online and offline behavior, let's talk about the transition between these two states. As the ninth principle states, the UI transition as the network degrades should not be jarring. How is this reflected in our workflow diagrams?

As mentioned, an online functionality is highlighted in white, while an offline functionality is highlighted in grey. The transition points are the lines between white and grey. We need to think about what happens when someone is in the white space and their Internet connection goes down, or when they are in the grayspace and want to do something that is reserved for online use only. How do we be transparent about what's going on?

Being informative about what can or cannot be done

When people are offline, they may want to do something that may only be done online. This is a reasonable desire but we can't defy the laws of physics, so what do we do? There are a few strategies that we can take. Going from the...