Bruce Lawson’s personal site : 2016 : August

Reading List

Friday 26 August 2016

The big news: From Chrome Apps to the Web – Proprietary Chrome Apps will be deprecated (on non-Chrome OS devices) in favour of Progressive Web Apps
How monetizing became malvertising – “half the ads with malware payloads were on either news or entertainment websites, with news at the top of the pack (32 percent)”
The Future Web Wants You by Brian “Extensible” Kardell
Browsing your website does not mean I want your spam – third-party tracking gets eviller
Five Rules Of App Localization In China: Money, Dating And App Store
Save as ebook – Save a web page/selection as an eBook (.epub format) – a Chrome/Firefox/Opera Web Extension
Free VPN for Android without data limits: Opera VPN – free, no-login, unlimited date, choose from 5 virtual locations, cute logo
Ericsson report: Experience shapes mobile customer loyalty – “While cellular networks have improved… smartphone users are still facing issues as frequently as they did in 2013.”
North Korea ‘Netflix’ device unveiled – a video-on-demand set-top box. Not sure what kind of videos; it’s called “Manbang”. Netflix responded “We are bummed we didn’t think of that name first.”

Reading List

Friday 19 August 2016

M-commerce: has the mobile web finally won? – “Not only are more smartphone users purchasing with their mobile devices, but more people are choosing to make those purchases via mobile web rather than via mobile apps.”
Writing Less Damn Code – because it’s good to be lazy. By Heydon Puckering
Offline Storage for Progressive Web Apps – useful guide to APIs, cross-browser support & polyfills by Addy Osmani
10k Apart– A List Apart’s contest: build a compelling web experience that can be delivered in 10KB & works without JavaScript.
Chrome alternative for Windows XP and Vista – Opera is the only major browser to provide security updates for all Win XP/ Vista users (because more than 10% of computer users are on XP)
The <source> element – video from CSS Day in which my glamorous fellow-Operative, Simon Pieters, looks at the <source> element, how it works and how it came to be. Major anorak goodness.
FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format – smaller than WebP, one single file for both low & high res images, no patents
Copresence in WebVR – “multi-user chat prototype that uses peer-to-peer audio and data connections to establish a virtual audio experience. Voices are spatialized based on the position and orientation of each participant (using Web Audio). Also, you can shrink and grow, which, in addition to changing your avatar’s size, pitch shifts your voice.” by Boris Smus.
What is React? asks Remington Sharp
building a components system – a talk by Alice Bartlett (Financial Times). (Slides)
This Is What’s Missing From Journalism Right Now – MotherJones spent $350K on investigation to get an important story, took $5K in ad revenue, and experiments with a new monetisation model for journalism
Chinese Tech Firms Forced to Choose Market: Home or Everywhere Else
Welcome to the Age of Digital Imperialism – “As Thailand is discovering, the smartphone — for all its indispensability as a tool of business and practicality — is also a bearer of values; it is not a culturally neutral device”
Binary Safety Warning – “Bitcoin.org has reason to suspect that the binaries for the upcoming Bitcoin Core release will likely be targeted by state sponsored attackers.”
Headline of the week: Police seek hardened criminal after penis pump is stolen from Mildura sex shop

Archive for August, 2016