Hey Google, Talk To Crested Butte Powder

It was another amazing conference in Crested Butte – The Winter Tech Forum (or try the short version of its name).

It’s been over 11 years since I first came to learn about it. The quality of the people and the venue with the passion to hack and learn, make it an experience that is unique and amazing.

The first couple of days are composed of sessions and lighting talks at the evenings. But on the 3rd day, we have a hack day where people can go wild and build something fun.

This year, my hack was a Google Assistant App that tell you if it’s a pow day.
You can just say something like: “Ok Google, talk with Crested Butte Powder” and you will be able to ask it if it’s time to run for the mountain.

You can see it in action with the code at: powder-day-cb.glitch.me or if you are on a mobile device (Android or iPhone with the Assistant App installed) – click here.

Of course, you can just say it to the Google Assistant…

May you have lots of powder days with sunny sky!

 

Actions On Google – GDD Europe

Google Developer Days (GDD) are global events showcasing the latest developer products and platforms from Google. It’s like Google I/O but not in California. It was a fun event and we had the chance to meet many developers and talk about interesting challenges and opportunities.

We just finished this talk on “Actions on Google – Why? What?” at Google Developer Summit and you can find the slides and the video recording below.

 

 

Like with any new platform, the first question you might have is why?
In this case, it will be something like “Why do I need an assistant app? I already have a native and a mobile app”, right?

Here are few points to keep in mind:

Share Location On The Web With Waze

If you have a website that contain ‘just’ your (business) address you can do better.

How?

You can use the links below to help your users navigate to you with one click.

This will save them the trouble to ‘select’, ‘copy’ and open their map app in order to get to you. Waze supports an API which enables developers to open the Waze client application through an external URL. The URL can be accessed from within your mobile web page or web app.

The following are the available parameters you can insert to your ‘a href’ tag:

Online Editors For Web Developers

One of the most powerful aspects of the web is the ability to share your ideas and work with others quickly.

Over the years, I tried several options to share code and do demos. It’s true that you can always start your own server and serve your site, but in many cases, you want to focus on your demo and not do administrative work again and again. Here are some tools that I enjoyed using and I still find myself returning to check them from time to time. In most of them you got a nice ability to move (even) faster and to use GitHub for your code.

Browsers And Their Capabilities

The web is by far the biggest platform out there.

It’s everywhere or at least it’s on the way to be everywhere. From powerful cutting-edge devices down to devices that can do nothing more then send few bytes of information.

However, this pluralism of ways to consume this information bring a challenge to web developers. We need to understand what are the limitations and what are the capabilities of the browsers that will run our work of art.

Here are set of tools that will help you with that challenge.

Research

• chrome status – Web platform feature support and examples. It’s a great way to see what is coming up… and try to test it today in Chrome Canary. You can also check blink-dev forum. Blink is Chromium’s rendering engine so I found some very interesting discussions.
• status modern ie – Like Chrome Status but for Edge and Internet Explorer. It gives you the current status and the roadmap.
• ES6 compatibility – From server side to browsers. Learn what will run and where. After all, the common technology to ‘run’ things is javascript. OK – ECMAScript, fine.
• caniuse.com – Mobile and desktop browser capabilities.
• what web can do today – Stuff that your browser can do, with links to demos and information about browser support.
• mobile html5 – A table that contain features per mobile browser.
• If you testing a new browser for its CSS3 support this tool will do the work for you – css3test.com

Startups Use AMP and PWA

Startups must be agile and move fast. This is the main reason why I think they should use more both AMP and PWA as technologies that give them a lot of power.

As an entrepreneur, you wish to build this magic wheel of
users -> feedback -> product improvements.

The web is giving you the ability to reach users quickly and without any barriers. Moreover, you have today a lot of tools that let you listen to what your users are telling you (by their actions, not just words). This is very powerful when you wish to find a product market fit and later when you working hard to fine tune it.

Go North Innovation Event

The founder of Research In Motion talking about quantum computing

I’ve just finish to give me talk at the Go North event. The goal of this talk was to expose young entrepreneurs to the power of the web platform and how they could leverage progressive web apps in order to improve their businesses. It was very cool to meet with a lot of developers and entrepreneurs that are passion about the mobile web. One of the interesting questions I got was around AMP and PWA and how to bridge between them. Here is the detailed answer. The shorter version is that you want to start with AMP as a great first impression that you give your users (it’s all about speed!) and later stay engage/productive with PWA.
The two scenarios below tell this story in a nutshell.