Dispatches From The Internets

Offline First: Love the Idea, Hate the Name

Back in 2014, I had the great pleasure of listening to Ola Gasidlo of Hood.ie discuss the importance of offline at Beyond Tellerrand in Düsseldorf, Germany. Her excellent talk was my introduction to the “Offline First” movement and, while I can get behind the idea, I’ve had some serious issues with the name. And with the rise of Service Workers as a simple, usable means of making our content available offline, I thought it worth revisiting the idea of “offline first”, if only to address its core fallacy.

Atomic Classification

We’ve run into similar issues with Pattern Lab’s enforced groupings on a large client project. Some just didn’t make sense, causing a little confusion for our team, but way more confusion for the client’s team. It added way more cognitive overhead than was really necessary for the project. The tool made testing components easy, but we eventually ended up leaving some buckets empty.

Planning Adaptive Interfaces: The Workshop

For the last few years I’ve been running a workshop alternately titled “Planning Adaptive Interfaces” or “Beyond Responsive”, depending on the conference. It’s been one of my favorite workshops to run for a number of reasons, but before I get into that, let me explain what it is and how it works.

Progressive Enhancement Gets a Conference

On March 4th, I’ll be in London to give the closing talk at EnhanceConf, the first conference dedicated progressive enhancement. Over the last few months, I’ve been talking to the conference’s organizer, Simon McManus, quite a lot. He’s put a lot of thought into the conference and I thought it might be interesting to interview him so he could share his motivations and hopes for the event.