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

Before and after


Thanks to our testing, we have verified that the app is functional. However, this is not the only way to evaluate the experience. We set out to write an app that maintains the rigor of an offline-only experience while augmenting it with online-only functionality. Let's compare the before and after and see how far we've come.

Before – offline only

Open your todo-app folder and reset the app to the state it was in at the close of Chapter 2, Building a To-do App. Now, start the app and walk through the experience to refresh your memory. At this point, with a fully offline experience, you can do the following:

  • Create a to-do list

  • Add/remove items from the to-do lists

  • Add/remove a description from a to-do item

  • Add/remove an image from a to-do item

  • Delete a to-do list

After – offline plus online

Now, reset the app to the state it was in at the close of Chapter 7, Choosing Intelligent Defaults. Walk through the same experience and note the differences. Verify that the app retains all of...