Autonomy first

Here is the translation of the note “Meet Offline First” . Some thoughts from it seemed interesting to me, and in general the trend is positive - in short, a group of enthusiasts decided to arrange a colloquium dedicated to the problems of optimizing mobile applications for working offline (that is, autonomously, without network coverage).

Registration Form - offlinefirst.org

At the moment, some members of our team are traveling: they are organizing conferences, participating in various events, conducting master classes, moving from country to country. In this regard, we not only experienced in our own skin all the charms of poor quality of communication and the Internet, but also communicated with other people from different parts of the world - everyone had their own stories and problems.
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Observing frequent breaks in the mobile Internet, even in the most civilized and most developed cities, we came to the conclusion that no, problems with coverage / speed will not be solved anywhere by themselves in the near future.



Usually we treat this problem rather optimistically, considering that in the future the network coverage and capacity will gradually grow. However, our recent experience has shown that such judgments are simply naive. Network load problems, variable quality coverage, the presence of areas with no coverage, weak signals (wi-fi, for example) and other problems that manifest themselves during travel - all this will almost always exist.

Geography can not be undone, as well as architecture. Travelers fall under a double blow: not only can you not find a successful transport (metro, high-speed trains, airplanes), but also extortionate roaming charges from OpSoSov - you have to carry a collection of SIM cards with you, as if you are Agent 007. And this is all from the Western European point of view.

Comrade Gregor spent the last 6 weeks traveling through Africa to AfricaHackTrip , and we in turn had the opportunity to talk to people from all over the world at the Mozfest event in London. Here, as in many other cases, we noticed a serious concern about the use of mobile applications without network coverage - people were eager to have better support for autonomous mode, both in web applications and in native ones.

WE CAN'T CONTINUE CREATING PC-SIMILAR APPLICATIONS TO CONTAIN THE CONSTANCY AND VELOCITY OF THE COMMUNICATION CHANNEL WHEN THE TEMPORARY DISCONNECTION FROM THE NETWORK OR LOW CALCULAR COMPETITIVENESS READ THE CODE ARE THE REVERSE ARE REVERSE AIRWAY.

Mobile networks simply cannot provide the same level of quality and stability, it was high time to begin to adapt to such a reality. It’s as if developing an application “primarily for mobile devices”, but considering this state of affairs, there is a development “first of all for autonomy”. By offline mode, we mean not only a special action plan in case of errors, but also a fundamentally more flexible and resilient application design path.

Together with our team , we developed an architecture that allows you to create stand-alone applications with relative ease. We do not keep it a secret, but maintain confidentiality about the technical aspects of our sync engine and how it provides autonomy. Suddenly, we are faced with an abundance of new, still unknown and unexplored usage scenarios that have become available to most developers just now.



This is literally a new frontier beyond which lies the unknown, full of interesting problems and unimaginable special cases. In other areas of application design, we have a legacy of UX / UI patterns, which we can easily apply. But the “application autonomy” we described is a real terra incognita .

AUTONOMY BECOMES REALITY

So suddenly, autonomy becomes more than just error handling. Autonomy has become a looming reality in which, yeah, some parts of your application will stop working - regardless of whether they need a network or not. This raises many fundamental questions:

• Should the application notify the person about the current connection status? Does this information relate to it? If so, which is best?
• Can we give users hope that the application correctly remembers its state and that no data will be lost, regardless of the state of the network?
• How to inform the user that he can continue to work with the application offline, and that the data entered by the user at this stage will be correctly sent / processed in the future?
• How should the interface display all the changes that have occurred since the last connection to the network? What to do with remote objects and so on
• How to make the inevitable resolution of the conflict as painless and intuitive as possible for the user?
• How about premature loading of some data that, according to the program, may be useful to the user offline?
• What metrics should be used to make decisions about the premature loading mechanism?

Of course, in fact there are many more questions. We needed to start somewhere and after we conducted our seminar at Mozfest - “Offline First Application Design” , it became clear which direction to continue. Before us stood a whole new paradigm, which we are ready to ride. We want to help hood.ie users create reliable, anywhere-working applications, not only from a technical point of view, but also with new patterns and UX and UI methods. You can join the discussion at offlinefirst.org .

PARA FROM TRANSLATION AUTHOR

In my opinion, the topic is not relevant to find. A week ago, I purchased a smartphone and went out of town - only EDGE remained 20km from Moscow, and on arrival at the place (40km) the channel was completely blocked. I have been there for 5 years in a row and during this period nothing has changed in MTS with coverage in that area, despite my questions to the support service. The network is there, the Internet is not, even if you pay (or cry). In principle, I was not going to do anything with the phone when there is a laptop and a megaphone modem with a perfect 3G nearby, but there is one thing. MTS-EDGE has a speed of about 3-5kbyte / s, it is enough for checking mail and so on. But through such a channel to send a photo on the same Instagram is impossible. The program does not know that I am ready to wait all day. It sends the first 50kbytes at a speed of 3kbytes / s and then issues “Upload Failed”. The most interesting thing was with the support of Twitter in WP7.5 OS a year ago - there was no error issued, but the system was not going to continue loading when a connection appeared, endlessly showing an imaginary progress-bar. Returning to the ideal 3G from Megaphone, I would note that in the metro area of ​​Semyonovskaya, the network is so overloaded during the day that the Internet can be waited there only at night, despite the coverage and the fact of 3G availability.
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Notes on translation are accepted in lichku.