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

Low-hanging fruit


The first six chapters focused on the harder problems in offline-first web development. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, a lot of apps do the small obvious things right (mostly), so there's not much to learn there. Second, solving the harder problems first means that you're making those changes while the app is simpler to understand and modify.

Small changes, even ultimately positive ones, add complexity to an app, making it harder to make changes later. We're now at a point where we can afford to backtrack and solve these smaller problems.

Error messages

Remember when we implemented support for maps in Chapter 3, Designing Online Behavior? As we haven't added support for offline maps, we get the following error message when opening the app while offline. It's ugly and doesn't describe the problem really well. We can do better.

Current error when map is not available

The current error message is defined by Sencha Touch. Let's override this. Create a new file named...