You might not need a native app for this!

Submitted Dec 13, 2017

Technical level: Beginner

A lot of developers seem to go to native (mobile) apps to solve complex problems. The web is evolving at a rapid pace, and for a lot of things we don’t need to go the native way anymore. From recording video to speech recognition, push notifications to getting the battery status, modern browsers host a whole set of APIs which help us achieve these things. Knowing some of these APIs exist might speed up the process of moving to a universal accessible web app or PWA in favour of a big native one.

Outline

The talk does not require any previous experience except some basic JavaScript knowledge. It will showcase some well known mobile apps, and explain how you can recreate parts of these apps using the power of a browser. The functionality of each app will be analysed and we’ll go through the step of recreating some parts using JavaScript, and available browser APIs. As a demonstration, I will show some apps recreated in the browser.

Speaker bio

I’m a front-end developer at madewithlove, a small app development company based in Belgium, but with employees all over the world.

For my day to day job I’m in charge of creating challenging user interfaces and make applications nice to work with.
After office hours I like to play around with the web-audio API, and other “exotic” browser APIs. One of my side projects is a library to add audio effects to an audio input using JavaScript.

I am one of the organizers of the Fronteers meetups in Belgium, where we handle a wide range of topics related to frontend development.

When I’m not behind a computer, you can find me playing the guitar, having a beer at a concert, or trying to snap the next perfect picture.

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