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VR on the web threatens to cleave the web platform in twain, like mobile did before it. The solution then and the solution now is Responsive Web Design, which websites to scale well for all form factors. Similarly, for VR to succeed on the web, we need to figure out how to make VR experiences that work both in any VR headset, and also without a VR headset at all. WebVR boilerplate is a new startin

Sensors found in smartphones define the mobile experience. GPS and the magnetometer enable the fluid experience of maps; motion sensing enables activity recognition and games, and of course the camera and microphone allow whole categories of rich media applications. Beyond these now obvious examples, sensors can also enable clever inventions, such as Cycloramic, which used the vibrator motor in iP

The phone in your pocket is an amazing, fluid, multi-functional tool. When it comes to talking to other devices, such as your TV or laptop, the user experience drops off sharply. Bill Buxton speaks eloquently on the subject, describing three stages of high tech evolution: Device works: feature completeness and stability Device flows: good user experience Many devices work together But connecting d

Extension developers aren't given much freedom to modify Chrome's browser chrome. Without resorting to changing the page itself, or using the new devtools extension APIs, there are two main ways of doing this. Page actions, which reside in the omnibox, and browser actions, which are positioned to the right of the omnibox both of which are simple buttons with icons, click actions and hover states.

These days, I write a lot more code, and my projects have increased in complexity. Often, a single application brings many kinds of data sources and bleeding edge web features together. On the other hand, most of what I build are prototypes, which need to be churned out quickly, work reliably in demos, and look/feel good. MVC frameworks help write UI code much more quickly, but there are drawbacks

Ember and Backbone are both promising JavaScript frameworks but have completely different philosophies. In this post, I'll compare the two, both from a practical and philosophical perspective. I'll defer to real world experience with Backbone and SproutCore (Ember's predecessor), as well as basic experiments with Ember (full disclosure: haven't built a large Ember app yet). I'll also supplement cl

There are many technical decisions to make when writing web applications. I've come back to writing modern web applications lately, and wanted to consolidate some scattered thoughts that I’ve recorded over the course of my development cycle. In particular, this post is about the set of frameworks that I found to be instrumental in developing my most recent project. I'll go over some of the most im

Chrome’s developer tools (also known as the WebKit inspector) are super useful for web developers. If you aren't ramped up already, take a look at this cheat sheet overview. Also check out some of many online resources, such as the official documentation, which is quite readable, and this 12 tricks screencast from Paul Irish. But let’s not get sidetracked here. I wasn't going to write about using

One day I had some friends over at my house introducing me some cool iPad games. One of the games was Osmos, developed by an Canadian indie studio called Hemisphere Games. You control a little blob that floats in 2D space, and the only thing your blob can do is shoot pieces of itself in a given direction, which propels it in the opposite direction. The rules of the game are simple, the main rule b

PhoneGap is a very useful cross-platform web application wrapper that lets developers package web applications into native apps. It also lets web apps access functionality traditionally only available in native apps. This how-to is about exposing additional Android functionality to the web with PhoneGap plugins. Intents are a fundamental part of the Android ecosystem, allowing a sort of message-pa