Using science to make truly tappable user interfaces

Since the average human finger pad is 10 to 14mm — and the average fingertip is 8mm to 10mm we can pretty easily define a range for what constitutes a “truly tappable UI:” A truly tappable UI is built with elements that are at minimum around 10mm, with the optimum touch element size around 13mm. …

Fixing HTML Video on Mobile

Samir Zahran on how and why they built Whitewater, an open source video encoder and player for their site: Common HTML5 Video features such as preloading and autoplay are completely missing in some browsers. The scripting APIs are limited compared to what’s available on desktop. Worst of all, Safari on the iPhone (the most popular …

The mobile device lab at Facebook

Insightful post by the folks at Facebook on how they transitioned from testing their apps on a single device to a mobile device lab (holding 1000+ devices) at their Prineville data center. Having tried out several things, they eventually built their own custom racks which not only hold the devices, but also function as an …

Pepperoni – A delicious blueprint for mobile development

Pepperoni is a blueprint for building cross-platform mobile experiences rapidly with ready-to-use integrated building blocks for common mobile app features, powered by React Native. The Pepperoni blueprint is crafted on a solid foundation using modern architecture and industry best practices. Pepperoni →

Facebook: Mobile @Scale London recap

Less than three years ago, engineers from Twitter, LinkedIn, Dropbox, Pinterest, and Facebook — including two from the then brand-new Facebook London office — met at Mobile @Scale in Menlo Park to talk about the challenges of building mobile software at large scale. Last Wednesday, the first Mobile @Scale London showed how far mobile development …

Mobile Development with a #devops mindset

Kick-ass presentation which Patrick Debois – the one and only – gave as a lecture to my students Web & Mobile Development. In the presentation he reflects on a recent high profile mobile app Small Town Heroes, the company he works at, launched: This presentation shows how you can improve your mobile development cycle when …

The end of apps as we know it

The idea of having a screen full of icons, representing independent apps, that need to be opened to experience them, is making less and less sense. The idea that these apps sit in the background, pushing content into a central experience, is making more and more sense. That central experience may be something that looks …