In our previous post, we talked about how to improve an app’s performance and user experience by incrementally updating our app’s UI as we received a stream of data from our API. Our example app was built on the Fetch API and can-ndjson-stream to get a ReadableStream of NDJSON and render the stream in our app.
Loading
Ever wish you could send your data as a stream so that the client can start manipulating it and rendering it as it arrives? Tired of waiting for your entire JSON object to resolve before your users see anything interesting? As you may have seen in my previous article on David Walsh Blog, this is now possible with the Fetch API! Stream responses are supported in Chrome 52 and in development in Firefox and Edge. This quick tutorial will show you how to set up a simple Express API to emit a ReadableStream of NDJSON.
.png)
The Bitovi Team
The slim loader is a new minimal production loader for StealJS apps. You can think of slim as taking all of the useful features that StealJS provides and stripping them away to only what you actually use in your application. This means that your users don't download any code that you're not using, which improves the speed of your application.
The Bitovi Team
Design
User testing is a great way to validate assumptions and gain new insights about how people interact with our websites and apps. When it comes to eCommerce (and in particular mobile commerce or “mCommerce”) it’s critical to understand how people find and purchase products online. This was evident on one project where we were tasked with testing the mobile website design for retail membership giant, Sam’s. As it turns out, there are many common navigation patterns that aren’t nearly as effective as people might think.
The Bitovi Team
Design
Think of the app on your phone that you love using: the one that just makes sense when you use it, the one that feels like it was built with you in mind. This is good UX or User Experience. Good UX makes an application sticky; it invites new users and retains active users. UX is the process of designing an application (or product) that is intuitive for people to use by considering how they will use it. Intuitive interactions are important for every project simply because people like things that are ‘easy to use’. However, creating a product that is easy to use takes lot of time, expertise, and iterations.
The Bitovi Team
Design
There is nothing more rewarding than watching people use your app and seeing how they interact with it. User testing is a lot like making dinner for someone; you choose a recipe, ingredients, and invest time making a meal you hope your guests will like. Then you sit down with them and talk about what is good about the meal, what could be improved, and if you’d make it again. At Bitovi, we put a lot of value on testing our designs (and our assumptions!) to be sure we’re building the right thing for our clients and our clients' customers.
The Bitovi Team
Design
After a technology-filled day at work, one of my favorite ways to relax is to sit with my dog and knit something. I love the tactile qualities of fiber. I can create something both appealing and functional (much like the interfaces at work), but without hunching over my laptop.
The Bitovi Team
StealJS 1.0 is here and represents an important milestone along its mission. This article reiterates that important mission, goes over a few of 1.0's most useful features, explains how to upgrade for 0.16 users, and looks ahead to what's coming on StealJS's roadmap.
StealJS's mission is to make it cheap and easy to do the right thing. Doing the right thing, when building for the web, includes things such as writing tests and breaking your applications into smaller mini-applications (modlets) that can be composed together.
The Bitovi Team