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

Usage scenarios


We've gone through a lot of information in the past couple of chapters about intelligent caching. Let's pause and talk about some real-world scenarios that might affect the approach that you take in your own apps. We'll use the scenarios in Chapter 1, The Pain of Being Offline and apply what we've learned so far about offline development.

To facilitate the discussion, let's map each scenario to the following three axes:

Usage scenario axes

The three dimensions are Internet speed, Offline frequency, and Space on device. The more a scenario falls on the left-hand side of the graph, the more optimization we need to do. If the Internet speed is Slow, users are going to need caching to be highly prioritized: the most frequently viewed lists and text first and images and revision history last. If they're offline most of the time, the cache becomes sacred. Once gone, it's impossible to get it back. If their device is space-constrained, caching must be highly selective. Frequently viewed...