Offline safety in a cloud app | Hacker News Reader

Offline safety in a cloud app

blog.uxpin.com

27 pointsmtreder14 comments

The idea is by no means new. localStorage is old. So is the AppCache specifications that actually allows an application to go 'offline'. Gmail did this as early as 2009: http://googlecode.blogspot.sg/2009/04/gmail-for-mobile-html5...

Unfortunately it's not as easy as it looks. I found that out when doing research for a weekend project. Here's an excellent A List Apart article detailing all the gotchas you can face while working with it: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/application-cache-is-a-do.... The Financial Times Labs have an interesting article talking about an approach to deploying an offline app that uses the AppCache as little as possible: http://labs.ft.com/2012/08/basic-offline-html5-web-app/

And of course you can find information about it in places like Dive into HTML5 and MDN, by simply searching for them

This is a technical site, some technical details of the implementation would be more appropriate.

In terms of the app itself, web apps generally offer some way to fire them up straight away without having to sign up. Many users, myself included, will just click cancel on the sign up screen. You have to give us something first before we trust you with our email. Edit: I ended up looking by just entering a rubbish email address.

The landing page is very pretty, though the app looks somewhat like https://moqups.com/ at a glance.

You're absolutely right, we're working on an additional info about technical side of this feature (as a response to comments).

Showing the app before signing up is something that we're constantly thinking about. Probably it's about the time to make it comes true. My apologizes for the inconvenience.

Moqups.com is great, but it's really focused on a different problem.

UXPin - The UX Design App (http://uxpin.com) helps teams fighting for the best UX Design possible of their web&mobile apps, during whole design process.

You can create wireframes, interactive prototypes, upload requirements, personas, visual design - and discuss each deliverable in one place.

ps. We were launched way before Moqups :)

I thought localStorage was evil. http://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/03/there-is-no-simple-solution...

Taken in context: low performance and low reliable storage space. So, way more than sufficient for a few simple things, and not much else. IndexedDB is massive overkill for lots of things, cookies have other problems for other things, localStorage fits nicely in the middle and should be used as such.

I have other reasons for disliking localStorage. Two tabs in e.g. Chrome (a few versions back, at least) can write to it and the contents from one tab can be delayed by as much as a second; one tab can read older-than-current data from another (A writes X then Y, B reads X); writes can interleave at the string level, making it possible to produce garbage data (like "abc123def" when writing "abcdef" and "123" from different tabs) - when you add this to the delay and old data problems, it's sometimes undetectable and unfixable.

This is relatively cool, but that's not a great article.

True. That's just a short blogpost, that I wrote mostly to let now our customers about new feature (really crucial for them). Suddenly hundreds of people are reading it.

While I'm super-happy and even more thankful for all the up votes, I'm a little bit ashamed that it's not a top-notch writing and in-depth analysis of the problem.

Anyway thanks Hackernews! Glad you like it. Local storage should be a must-be for any cloud app.

If you're working with local storage, I highly recommend using the following library:

http://amplifyjs.com/api/store/

It has a very simple interface and internally it has a bunch of fall-back storage mechanisms in case one isn't supported by the browser.

Thanks!

Somewhat on-topic: interesting mobile networking piece with actual technical discussion (by Mike Belshe): http://www.fiercedeveloper.com/story/mobile-networking-where...

Well, that's exactly how Dropbox or Apple's iCloud work. Kinda standard these days

Unfortunately it's not a standard in Saas tools e.g. wireframing apps.

I've just updated the post with a comment of Jacek - our great programmer and author of this feature.

If you'll have any specific questions, we'll try to answer them :)

Thanks for sharing. Cloud is very popular these days.

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