Albin Larsson: Blog

A introduction to App Ground

On Github I describe App Ground as a “template/boilerplate for javascript/HTML5 web apps.”. That’s true but for most web apps App Ground is overkill. It uses things like AppCache, print styles and Open Graph.

I have often found myself adding all the stuff that’s in App Ground to my basic HTML template when I starting on a new “advanced” web app. Some of these projects led to tons of optimizing, icons, offline support, speed, mobile support… I looked into projects as HTML5 Boilerplate and other templates, they’re great but with one problem they doesn’t approach apps in a scaling perspective. I believe in apps that scales from mobiles to big TV screens not just by provide native apps or mobile sites.

From that point of view I started working on App Ground. The first of August I did release the first stable version. On 4th August 1.0.1 was released after some fast feedback and discussions. But what features is in App Grounds 15 files?

Features

CSS

Normalize.css Normalize.css is an alternative to CSS resets, it’s developed by Nicolas Gallagher. Normalize.css is also used by Twitter Bootstrap, HTML5 Boilerplate and many other big projects.

Print Styles

Print Styles in App Ground allows you to force page breaks, it also allows you to hide/view specific elements when a user is printing a page. The print styles is provided by Facile Framework.

Help Classes

Help Classes is a collection of CSS classes you will use often, this includes classes to hide/view specific elements on different screen resolutions, align text and other common classes. Help Classes is also provided by Facile Framework.

JS

jQuery

App Ground comes with jQuery 2.0.3 that supports major modern browsers. App Ground loads jQuery from the Google CDN, if it fails jQuery is loaded from a local copy.

Help JS

Help JS sets variables telling you if your user has a internet connection, a touch device,or is browsing your app in portrait or landscape mode and other things… Note that detecting touch devices does not work in some older browsers as Internet Explorer 9 Mobile(Windows Phone 7/7.5/7.8).

Meta Tags

Open Graph

The Open Graph Protocol(OGP) was developed at Facebook but it’s now supported by major search engines and social networks(Facebook, Google+, Google, Twitter, Bing…). It allows you to add images, types and other things to your meta data.

AppCache

AppCache allows your user to browse your app when unable to connect to the internet. Remember you can use Help JS to detect when a user doesn’t have a internet connection. Note that AppCache isn’t supported by Internet Explorer 9.

App Ground have many other features that you can discover by browsing the code at Github(the docs will be available soon). In the time of writing the latest version of App Ground is 1.1.1(CHANGELOG).

Abbe?

If you are reading this you probably know me from some corner of the web, maybe we did have a discussion about web accessibility, do we follow each other on Google+ or Twitter? Do or have we worked together at any open source project? No matter if you working at Mozilla(just a example) or are studying in Katrineholm and know me through friends, I should introduce myself to give you an idea about what you can expect to find here later on…

To make a long story short…

When you doesn’t find me near a computer or studying in Katrineholm you will find me in a forest somewhere looking for flags doing orienteering. I did get my first computer when I was four, from Ericsson because I crashed one of theirs using hot chocolate. It was a Dell running Windows 95, it’s still here somewhere but I think it has Debian installed…

Today some people would say that Windows is my main platform(I have a Lumia(900)) some would say openSUSE the operating system I prefer… If someone would ask me which operating system that’s my main platform I would answer that I don’t see operating systems as anything more than a gate to the web… I don’t know what the first thing you do when you starts your computer but I would guess that you open your web browser. The only things I’m not doing in the web browser is programming, no online tool is powerful enough yet(no tool have all the features I want)…

My first experience with programming was from the good old game Age of Empires II, I remember myself developing a new AI for the game. Since then I haven’t been able to play a game without thinking how it works…

What’s happening right now then?

I do tons of work on my open source projects such as App Ground and Facile Framework. I contribute to Adobe Brackets, Together.js(by Mozilla) and some smaller ones. Of course I do a lot of work with web accessibility too(and my secret projects). The stuff that are most “soon to be available” are probably App Ground Documentation, Facile Framework 1.0.0, Board 2 and App Ground 1.1.2.

Now back to homeworks…

Up and running!

So after a week working with Jekyll, this new blog is somewhat ready for use. I will probably do changes to the site every week until summer, I have already things on the “todo” list for this blog.

Learning Jekyll wasn’t as expected, I did run into several problems just because I had no idea of what I was doing, but with some explanation from the open source community the solutions was never far away and now I know how Jekyll works. You can find the old site under “Projects” in the menu, I won’t keep it there for long…

So do you want to follow along on my destiny to mess around with web standards, web accessibility and open source? Follow me on Google+, Twitter or using RSS.