Hello.

How should Web and Chrome Developer Relations work?

Building Progressive Web Apps progressively is possible. This is how I did it.

I couldn't find an easier way, so I built it myself

Custom Elements need clear and parsable API documentation.

This little doozey hit me, so I'm documenting incase anyone else has the same issue

My adventures in creating resuable web components around sharing.

Last year just before the Chrome Dev Summit, Miguel Casas came up to me and showed me something that blew my mind: Face Detection in the browser using the Shape Detection API. Shortly after that Barcode Detection was added that allowed me to update my QR Code scanner so that I no longer had to include a massive (albeit awesome) port of a QR scanning library. The Shape Detection API is still in development, and neither the FaceDetection nor the Barcode Detection API’s are available outside experimentations (you need to enable “Experimental Web Platform features” in chrome://flags) but it is a very exciting space to watch and see another platform capability being opened up to developers and users on the web.

Within the last 6 months, it felt like a good time to get on board properly with Web Components so I’ve been toying around with bits and pieces. I’ve been thinking about the ecosystem as a whole and I’ve also recently been creating a few elements. One thing that is really unclear to me is that there is no defined best practice for how to include styles and templates (HTML) with your custom element which means as a consumer of Custom elements you are at the mercy of what the component developer thinks is best.

Following on from my list of the things that I am [excited about on the web in 2017](/2017-exciting-times/) here are three predictions of things that I think will happen in 2017 based off reading tea-leaves and random musings of things that I have 0 direct knowledge of but I might do if I was 'them'.

There are lots of things happening on the web, and this is just a small list of what excites me.

It's the end of the road for Flash and plugins on the web, what do we do now on the web?

I’ve been building out a quick sample that lets you quickly hook up an web push with a simple cURL request. The principle being that I would like to get integrations with third party APIs that currently don’t support Web Push in any way. The thing about webhooks is that they are not standarised in any way other than you will most likely get a blob of data in a POST HTTP request, for example Travis CI application/x-www-form-urlencoded encodes the request data, whereas Github will just put a JSON object as the POST payload.

It's possible in 3 simple steps

Thoughts on the year on the web for our team

This is mostly for future reference. I recently built a tool trims a video and I needed to convert from seconds to the time-code format that FFMPEG uses of hh:mm:ss.ms const secondsToTimeCode = function(timeInSeconds) { const zeropad = function(number) { return (number <= 9) ? `0{$number}`: number; } const hours = Math.floor(timeInSeconds / 3600) const minutes = Math.floor((timeInSeconds - (hours * 3600)) / 60) % 60; const seconds = timeInSeconds % 60; return `${zeropad(hours)}:${zeropad(minutes)}:${zeropad(seconds)}`; }; It worked well for what I needed.

Finally you can record your screen directly on Android via JS... well 'finally' is a strong word.

Welcome to the world of the headless web and a massive fudge

In a recent project building a web push service I wanted to have my UI respond to application level events (semantically if you will) because there were a couple of components that require information from the system but are not dependent with each other and I wanted them to be able to manage themselves independently of the ‘business logic’. I looked around at lots of different tools to help me, but because I frequently have a heavy case of NIH syndrome and the fact that I think people can implement their own infrastructural elements pretty quickly, I decided to quickly knock-up a simple client-side PubSub service — it worked pretty well for my needs.

The other week I talked about Face Detection via the Shape API that is in the Canary channel in Chrome. Now barcode detection is in Chrome Canary too (Miguel is my hero ;) Barcodes are huge! they are on nearly every product we buy. Even the much maligned QRCode is huge outside of the US and Europe. The barcode and the QRcode provide a simple way for you to bridge the physical world and the digital world by transferring small amounts of data between the medium and you.

I recently built a Progressive Web App that takes a screencast from your Android device and then wraps the video in a device frame using FFMPEG.js like so: I also managed to sort out building ffmpeg.js so that with relative ease, create custom optimized builds of ffmpeg and run it in the browser. The two things together I think present a lot of opportunities to build some great new small Progressive Web Apps that push what we think the web is capable of with regards to manipulating audio and video.