Four Kitchens Blog

We at Four Kitchens believe native mobile applications — the things you download from the App Store or Google Play and install on your smartphones or tablets — are a stop-gap technology that will be replaced by web applications that run inside browsers. Here’s why:

• Many “apps” are simply dumbed-down versions of websites. This is frustrating to users who want to access the full capabilities of those websites.
• Maintaining a website and multiple versions of apps (iOS, Android, Windows Mobile) in multiple flavors (the so-called “HD” apps for larger screens) is expensive and inconvenient.
• Apps were originally invented because websites couldn’t tap into the capabilities of mobile devices. Now, wrappers like PhoneGap and native Device APIs expose websites to your device’s senses: touch (gestures, multitouch), sight (cameras, ambient light sensors), sound (microphones), motion (compass, accelerometers), and location (GPS, proximity detectors).

Everything is converging on the web. Or, rather, reconverging on the web. But there’s just one, tiny thing — a single, critical flaw on popular mobile devices — that will prevent web apps’ ascendency and continue to prop up the “need” for native apps. It’s not hardware-software integration, which is quickly being solved with clever APIs and libraries. It’s not frontend performance, as increased processing power and better JavaScript support will level the playing field. It’s much simpler than that. It’s a matter of psychology.

It’s the icon.

4K news this week:

• Chris Ruppel wrote an amazing post on how One Less JPG can help you increase frontend performance in a pinch.
• Ian Carrico rounded up some of the best mobile-themed talks at DrupalCon Portland in this mobile roundup.
  • We will be teaching an Advanced Responsive Design class in Portland. If you haven’t already, check it out and register here. We’re also teaching a version of this class to Austin locals that may not be attending DrupalCon Portland. You can buy the very last ticket here.

Links around the watercooler:

• We can juggle that! We just discovered that Combat Juggling is a thing. Naturally, we want to start our own team. Want to join us?
• Women who code: Github is partnering with the Ada Initiative to provide free private repos to women contributing to open source. As open source advocates and contributors, we think this is exceedingly cool of Github.
• Have your laptop beat Super Mario for you: Don’t have time to stomp on Goombas on your own time? This computer is programmed to beat classic NES games from Super Mario Bros. to Bubble Bobble.

I’d like to demo a simple how-to. There are many, many techniques to make pages load faster, but this post attempts to demonstrate large gains from very small code changes.

People often build beautiful sites with multiple easy-to-use JavaScript libraries. Then, when it comes to addressing frontend performance, suddenly those libraries are an enormous download that the users are forced to bear.

Read on to see how you could make bigger and better optimizations.

From its inception in 2009, Four Kitchens has been heavily involved in the planning and organizing of DrupalCamp Austin, along with other Austin Drupal leaders like Astonish Design, Volacci, and Entermedia (to name a few).

It seemed like in 2011, we had hit our stride: Angela Byron was keynoting, we produced one of the first responsive DrupalCamp websites, introduced full-day training to the camp, and finally found a cool Druplicon mascot (we love you, hipster Druplicon).

Then in 2012, things came to a halt. Maybe the Mayans meant to predict the end of DrupalCamp Austin and not the end of the world. Okay, maybe not. But 2012 was definitely a turning point in the Austin event landscape with the inaugurating Formula 1 race at Circuit of the Americas. While CoA is great for the Austin economy, it was bad news for us and our camp.

Every hotel in Austin and the metro area was booked solid for the whole month of November, which is when we usually host our camp. We didn’t want to put on a camp that would be inaccessible to folks from out of town, especially our friends in Dallas and Houston; so we decided to cancel the camp as a result. (Although we did have an awesome one-day event aptly called Drupal Day Austin.)

Back with a vengeance

We’re no Die Hard 3, but we are back with a vengeance in 2013! (Sam Jackson may even make an appearance at this year’s camp. Okay, no. Don’t get your hopes up.)

Here’s what’s new this year: