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

Designing the online workflow


As you'll recall, this is the offline workflow that we designed in Chapter 2, Building a To-do App:

Workflow

This workflow is the offline nucleus of our app. We may add additional functionalities but it is not allowed to impinge on the offline integrity of this basic workflow. We will visualize this nucleus as follows in the next few diagrams, with the offline functionalities shaded in grey:

Offline nucleus

The existing screens are available for us to extend in the online mode but the core workflow remains unchanged. What additional functionalities should we enable while online?

Let's review the user stories from Chapter 1, The Pain of Being Offline:

  1. Items should display while offline.

  2. Keep all my devices in sync.

  3. Don't keep me waiting.

  4. Sharing with friends should be bulletproof.

  5. Safeguard my data.

Of these user stories, 2, 4, and 5 have requirements that are not currently satisfied by our offline-only experience. Let's see how we can extend the current workflow to accommodate...