Hello.

I am Paul Kinlan.

A Developer Advocate for Chrome and the Open Web at Google.

I love the web. The web should allow anyone to access any experience that they need without the need for native install or content walled garden.

Chasing App Development from every angle

Paul Kinlan

The blog post explores the current state of web development, highlighting the tension between optimization demands from major players like Google and the emergence of new, faster build tools. It expresses the author's personal experience with these new tools and their potential to streamline the development workflow.

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PWA: Progressive Web All-the-things

Paul Kinlan

This blog post discusses the evolution of Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) since their inception in 2015. While PWAs offer numerous benefits like offline functionality, push notifications, and installability, the author observes that adoption hasn't been universal. Many developers and businesses misunderstand PWAs, sometimes treating them as separate products or focusing on single features like push notifications. The post argues that the focus should shift from "apps" to user experience. It proposes a set of principles for modern web experiences: discoverable, safe, fast, smooth, reliable, and meaningful. These principles aim to guide developers towards building better web experiences that naturally embody the core values of PWAs, benefiting both users and businesses.

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What were the UX issues with Web Intents?

Paul Kinlan

This post revisits the UX issues that contributed to the demise of Web Intents. We never adequately addressed the wide array of potential actions and data types, leading to a generic and confusing user experience. Handling data return from a long-running operation in another app proved problematic, especially if the initiating app closed. The lack of an explicit API for expecting returned data, similar to Android's startActivityForResult, further hindered the development of intuitive UI affordances. The open nature of Web Intents resulted in a proliferation of schemas and protocols, making standardization difficult. Users were forced to choose an app for every action, and developers lacked control over how apps launched, leading to inconsistent experiences. Finally, the absence of reliable fallbacks for unsupported intents eroded developer confidence and potentially left users stranded. In short, a combination of UX shortcomings ultimately led to Web Intents' downfall.

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Be Instant and Engaging on the mobile web - Google for Mobile India

Paul Kinlan

I've spent this week in India doing more research about Web Development in India and how mobile is changing that. Publically at least it is not rosey, app development and app thinking is very high whislt building for the web with mobile in mind is very low.

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Deep App linking and changes to Chrome on Android

Paul Kinlan

Deep App Links: Changes have come to Chrome and this is my summary of what's happened, why and how to manage the change

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Living with Web Apps

Paul Kinlan

A spent a while living just with web apps. Here is my report.

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IO Question: How long did it take to develop the app? #io2011

Paul Kinlan

At Google I/O 2011, we showcased a mobile web app. Many asked about its development timeline. Work began on March 3rd, with core coding starting on March 25th. While the calendar time was just over a month, the effort was spread across four engineers, each dedicating about 20% of their time to their respective UI using the FormFactorJS framework. This setup facilitated isolated development, with the flexibility to inject custom code per form factor and a common base controller in controller.js. We also developed and leveraged two frameworks, LeviRoutes and FormfactorJS, to efficiently consolidate common logic and specialize the controller according to form factors.

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