078: With Rick Blalock

July 23rd, 2013 01:06:17 Download

This week we were joined by mobile architect Rick Blalock. Rick currently works at Appcelerator, a framework for building out native applications in Javascript. Rick also knows quite a bit about Joomla.

We talked about (roughly in order):

News’n’Links’n’Drama:

12:30 Why mobile apps are slow
21:17 Tweetbot Neue
22:42 Clear up EE drama: Brandon Kelley did not “rage quit” on stage, and EllisLab is looking for a new owner for CodeIgniter

Q & A:

25:12 Do you guys know any good resources that feature some advanced knowledge about web-apps on mobile devices?
33:58 What do you guys think of the responsive image delivery services that are coming online? Have you tried any? Do they reduce the ‘Ughck’?
42:15 With Google getting ready to punish sites that aren’t mobile friendly, do I need to start learning mobile-first responsive design even as a beginner, or should I develop a non-RWD site and then go back later and make it responsive?
47:45 What’s up with Haxe? It’s an open source platform that can compile to many different things, including the mobile platform.
51:56 What are the Pros and Cons of using Drupal vs Joomla these days?
57:04 How do you guys work with Git?

Sponsors:

32:15 BlendConf SEPTEMBER 5 – 7, 2013, Charlotte, NC
3 tracks / 40 talks. 20% off with the discount code ‘shoptalk’
45:52 Environments for Humans OCTOBER 21–23, 2013, The Stanley Hotel in the Rocky Mountains, Colorado, U.S. All the top people awesome at CSS will be there. Plus, SMACSS workshop!!!

Show Links:

078: With Rick Blalock [ 1:06:17 ] Download

Jens Ahrengot Boddum

Rick says (At 17:05) that he doesn’t know wether it’s true or not that the only advancements making JS faster is Hardware.

Sencha busts that myth in #2 on 5 Myths About Mobile Web Performance. In fact, they state that 50% of mobile JS performance gains over the last 4 years has come from software improvements – so at least that’s not true.

And, by the way, this is such a silly claim to make by Drew Crawford. Even if performance was tied to hardware only, what about new technologies like Web Workers that tacke the problem from an entirely different angle? Or the fact that we’re doing more and more animations with CSS now which, because of that, are often hardware accellerated?