Category: Programming

Finally I had some time to fix some bugs on the weekend – and I switched all queries to get() as I don’t see the point for this application to get live updates – one may ask why use Firebase at all. But I have to say it’s more than just the realtime features. How… Continue reading Typolino – Analyze Bundle Size

I never used animations with Angular. Funny as I remember having used the AngularJS variant quite excessively. So why not try it out. I’m pretty sure there is a cleverer way of doing it but maybe I just need to get used to the system first. Seems as if one can simply define the animations… Continue reading Typolino – Add animations

The first iteration of the web worker was OK and did the job. But somehow it didn’t feel good enough. I wanted to rewrite it using RxJs. The main reason being that with RxJs I have built in functionality to control concurrency. I don’t want a lesson with a lot of images to go crazy.… Continue reading Typolino – Web Worker Revisited

Just for fun I was thinking to add web workers to fetch the image download URLs and also the images in a web worker. If the URL is already there, perfect, if not wait for the web worker to complete its task. Actually web workers are quite well supported and it is super simple to… Continue reading Typolino – Web Worker

Caching has a big effect. But a first time visitor might still have to wait for certain resources to download. To improve the experience for the users we can try to prefetch resources that we most probably will need later (e.g. after the login). In our example application Typolino the candidates are found easily: the… Continue reading Typolino – Prefetching Assets

To improve the UX it is important to serve content as fast as possible. The Firebase hosting is pretty clever, but the images we serve from the storage has a default cache configuration that disallows caching the content. We can control the cache-control header when uploading the images. This will allow caching the content for… Continue reading Typolino – Cache Control

Finally I find some time to write about the upload utility. Maybe we can add an online editor later, but to get started quickly I decided to use a pure node application running on my local device using the Firebase Admin SDK. Now we are already connected to our DB and storage and can just… Continue reading Typolino – Upload Lesson

If we want to add sound to Typolino we need to consider the proper format. I’m not an expert but https://caniuse.com is usually very good at answering these kind of questions and also Wikipedia provides a good overview. I don’t care too much about the lossyness of the format as my audio capture device anyhow… Continue reading Typolino – Adding Speech

Right now when the browser loads an image in a Typolino session you may experience some flickering. The word is rendered before the image is loaded. That makes sense, but it’s just plain ugly. One way to solve this issue is to show a placeholder image – or to wait with the whole content as… Continue reading Typolino – Improve image loading

There are some things that need improvement. A great addition would be speech. Let’s add this next, just for fun.