Nick Gauthier is a web freelancer focusing on Ruby on Rails and JavaScript. His experience spans from SQL to Sass and he always tests, all the time. He wrote “Recipes with Backbone” with Chris Strom. Aside from freelancing Nick runs B’More Awesome, a Baltimore-based web training organization, and he also co-founded Exobrain, an online mind-mapping tool.
The simpler, smaller and lighter an application is, the cheaper and easier it will be to write from scratch. When Nick Gauthier set out to build MeetSpace, he and his team had a familiar decision to make: What’s our tech stack going to be? They gathered their requirements, reviewed their skillset and ultimately decided to use vanilla JavaScript and to avoid a front-end framework. Using this approach, they were able to create an incredibly fast and light web application that is also less work to maintain over time.
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The best mobile web applications are the ones that excel at handling mobile processors, network connectivity, bandwidth, latency and touchscreen keyboards. In this article, Nick Gauthier will look at how to identify the tasks your users want to accomplish on a mobile device, memorize your users’ situation, presume that their actions will succeed, and also how to predict your users’ next actions, and prepare accordingly. The mobile web is a harsh environment, but by simply focusing on what matters, you will find a clear path to a superior experience.
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