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Walking, talking and ideas for web apps

Paul Kinlan

An issue came up in a recent team meeting: in Developer Relations, how do you remain a leading expert in the field? My answer: Create. Build. Tell a story about what you have learnt. It is a principle shared by Roman Nurik which he called “Walk, then Talk”; I encourage you to read his post.

Our team, Chrome Developer Relations, are doing just this right now. We are building real-world apps that let us:

  • stretch our understanding of how to build modern web applications;
  • push the capabilities of the web platform as they are developed;
  • define new patterns for how to combine existing and bleeding edge platform features;
  • create great stories that tell developers how they can also build similar quality applications using the same tools.

If we can achieve this and socialize it well, it is my hope that we increase the minimum bar for what developers should deliver on the web and raise the expectation of user experience from users (I’ll talk more about this in another post, but I am using it to set the scene for this post.)

As a team we are lucky, we have a reasonable idea about the types of apps that we want to build and also the apps that we want to see on the web. But a lot of developers that I speak to struggle for ideas of what they can build.

I was catching up with Jake Archibald about how he came up with idea for SVGOMG  — SVGOMG is a great app for optimizing SVGs, it’s hard to tell that it is not a native app. It has a nice Material design, loads quickly, runs at 60fps, works across form-factors and has great use of touch gestures — and it came from the fact that people said SVGO was hard to use and needed a front end. A project was born!

He then used npm, found the SVGO and that gave him the impetus to create SVGOMG, a front-end client for a service library.

I think this is a brilliant idea! The promise of NodeJS is that it enables you to do full-stack development in one language. NodeJS and npm have built up a huge ecosystem (> 120,000 packages) of JS libraries, tools and utilities, primarily focused on the server side of your application.

I’m going to ask you take a mental jump, because getting I am going to skip how to get NodeJS packages working in the browser, but it requires you to use Browserify, which to quote the Browserify site:

browserify will recursively analyze all the require() calls in your app in order to build a bundle you can serve up to the browser in a single <script> tag.

Not every package will be browserify-erable, especially if it is a JS wrapper for an system level service (in which case Emscripten is an option), but the crux is, by using NPM and browserify we now have a huge repository of libraries that have done a huge amount of heavy lifting and are crying out for a beautiful, modern web app client.

What makes a modern web app? That comes in another post (Sorry).

I spent 20 minutes curating potential project ideas whilst casually browsing npm. I have also added them to the WebUtils project which is a great place to collaborate and discuss what should be built and how to build it.

Converters

Conversion tools are always a great source of app ideas.

Calculators

A simple search for “calculator” reveals a huge plethora of utilities that you can build upon.

Calendars and Dates

It constantly vexes me that every calendar I see on the web is 1) terrible, 2) optimized for desktop 3) full of ads and rubbish I don’t need.

Image tools

Who doesn’t want to manipulate images and why do we need native apps for actions we only perform a couple of times.

QR Codes

Every so often, you need to scan a QR code. Why do you need a native app for something you only use once in a blue moon.

In fact, I built a QR code reader:https://qrsnapper.appspot.com/  — article about this soon.

Editors

I hate having to install native apps just to edit part of a file or image only once, and I don’t think I am alone. People like to open files and do things with them. Make a front end for it.

Players and Readers

There are a huge number of API’s that are clients for existing web services. For example any audio service normally has an API that lets you read play lists and gives you access to the audio.

Markdown tools

Creating content on the web is a pain in the bum sometimes, Markdown at least can help make the authorship easier.

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Paul Kinlan

Trying to make the web and developers better.

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