The Challenges of Developing Offline Web Apps
As I mentioned at the end of my last post, there’s a lot of usability problems that make writing an offline web app difficult. When writing a “native” client-side app using technologies like Microsoft...
View ArticleHacking The Web With Interactive Stories
I recently made The Parable of The Hackasaurus, which is a game-like attempt to make web-hacking easy to learn through a series of simple puzzles in the context of a story. The parable is really more...
View ArticleWebmaker Tutorial Prototyping
Recently I’ve been playing around with creating interactive tutorials that teach people how to create things on the Web. Check out this prototype. At the end of a movie-like tutorial, you’ll be given a...
View ArticleStorything Interactive Prototype
Last week I merged the Webmaking Tutorial Prototype with the Webmaking 101 for Journalists prototype we made during our three day sprint in NYC in February. The result, which is code-named Storything,...
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Prototyping Presentations
Presentations take a long time to make. Particularly when I’m just conceptualizing my presentation, it takes a lot of work to record myself talking, use a tool to sync it with the proper visuals, and...
View ArticleLearning and Grammatical Forgiveness
HTML is a very interesting machine language because, like human languages, most things that interpret it are very forgiving. For instance, did you know that the following HTML is technically invalid?...
View ArticleQuestions: Designing for Accessibility on the Web
Marco Zehe recently wrote a good, sobering blog post comparing the accessibility of Web apps to those of native ones. Much of what I’ve seen on supporting accessibility on the Web has to do with using...
View ArticleBuilding Experiences That Work Like The Web
Much has been said about the greatness of the Web, yet most websites don’t actually work like the Web does. And some experiences that aren’t even on the web can still embody its spirit better than the...
View ArticleBuilding Bridges Between GUIs and Code With Markup APIs
Recently the Twitter Bootstrap documentation gave a name to something that I’ve been excited about for a pretty long time: Markup API. Markup APIs give superpowers to HTML. Through the use of class...
View ArticleOn Enforcing Mandatory Code Review
Many software projects enforce mandatory code reviews, even for their most senior developers. While I’ve mentioned before that code reviews can be very useful, I also think that mandatory code reviews...
View ArticleA HTML Microformat for Open Badges
Sometimes a person wanders by the #badges IRC channel and asks us how to issue a badge. The response usually involves asking the user what kind of technical expertise they have; if they’re a...
View ArticleClarifying Coding
With the upcoming Hour of Code, there’s been a lot of confusion as to the definition of what “coding” is and why it’s useful, and I thought I’d contribute my thoughts. Rather than talking about...
View ArticleDiscovering Accessibility
My final project working at the Mozilla Foundation was teach.mozilla.org, which was the first content-based website I’ve helped create in quite some time. During the site’s development, I finally gave...
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My First Elm App
I recently wrote my first application in Elm, which is promoted as a “delightful language for reliable webapps”. The application is an accessible color palette builder, which builds on the excellent...
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