Articles by Chris Mills
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Creating a mobile app from a simple HTML site: Part 2
Or: Making our simple app work for others In the first part of this series, which began late last year, we worked through the process of developing a school planner app. At this point (see the final code from Part 1) we’ve got multiple school plans displayed at once, and we’ve got Web, iOS and […]
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What’s new in Web Audio
Introduction It’s been a while since we said anything on Hacks about the Web Audio API. However, with Firefox 37/38 hitting our Developer Edition/Nightly browser channels, there are some interesting new features to talk about! This article presents you with some new Web Audio tricks to watch out for, such as the new StereoPannerNode, promise-based […]
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Exploring object-fit
On web documents, a common problem concerns the display of different sized images (or videos) in the same place. Perhaps you are writing a dynamic gallery app that accepts user submissions. You can’t guarantee that everyone will upload images of exactly the same aspect ratio, so what do you do? Letting the aspect ratio distort […]
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Creating a mobile app from a simple HTML site
This article is a simple tutorial designed to teach you some fundamental skills for creating cross platform web applications. You will build a sample School Plan app, which will provide a dynamic “app-like” experience across many different platforms and work offline. It will use Apache Cordova and Mozilla’s Brick web components. The story behind the […]
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Easy audio capture with the MediaRecorder API
The MediaRecorder API is a simple construct, used inside Navigator.getUserMedia(), which provides an easy way of recording media streams from the user’s input devices and instantly using them in web apps. This article provides a basic guide on how to use MediaRecorder, which is supported in Firefox Desktop/Mobile 25, and Firefox OS 2.0. What other […]
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Handling click-to-activate plugins using JavaScript
From Firefox 26 onwards — and in the case of insecure Flash/Java in older Firefox versions — most plugins will not be automatically activated. We therefore can no longer plugins starting immediately after they have been inserted into the page. This article covers JavaScript techniques we can employ to handle plugins, making it less likely […]
