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

Implementing image support


We left a few features unfinished in the last chapter. Currently, you cannot attach images to a to-do item or choose a location from the map. Let's implement the first of these now.

Installing the Cordova camera plugin

As Sencha Touch is a platform-agnostic framework, it doesn't have hooks in any of the native capabilities of your devices, including the camera. The downside is that there isn't a platform-independent way to attach photos. You have to implement separate solutions for different platforms. To keep things simple, we'll implement a solution for iOS. You'll be able to continue using the app with your desktop browser; you just won't be able to attach photos.

In Chapter 2, Building a To-do App we used Cordova to package our Sencha Touch app and deploy it to iOS. Cordova provides you with the ability to integrate with your phone's native capabilities through a plugin system. We'll use the camera plugin to give the app access to the images on your device.

Open...