Let’s Talk about Tooling
There are tons of tools out there, both proprietary and open source, whose sole purpose is to make app developers more productive. Everybody loves shiny new tools, right?
At Offline Camp, we decided to dedicate a full session to sharing tools that make designing Offline First applications easy. We shared advice and discussed similar tooling that folks were using to see which features seemed the most helpful overall.
Here I’ll highlight 5 tools that are helpful to Offline First lovers. These tools allow you to think about the experience of your users with the least amount of connectivity when designing your applications. There were three main themes for the tooling we discussed: UX/Design, Development, and QA/Testing. We also discussed a bunch of tools that make it easier to stay connected to civilization, but for the purposes of this post I’m going to focus on tools that make it easier to design/develop/test Offline First applications.
#1 — Dash
Dash gives your Mac instant offline access to 150+ API documentation sets. You can choose which documentation sets to download and Dash will take care of the rest, making sure they are kept up to date. You can also generate your own docsets, request docsets or download docsets from third-party sources.
#2 — PFSense
This open source security tool allows you to simulate networks for testing and also allows you to create network proxies. This tool has an active forum for product questions, and a bunch of sweet tutorials.
#3 — Wireshark
Wireshark is a network protocol analyzer that gives you details about what’s happening on your network. The tool allows for live capture, offline analysis (← oh yeah!) and runs on multiple platforms (Windows, Linux, OS X, etc.)
#4 — W3C Battery Status API
This specification defines an API that provides information about the battery status of the hosting device. Given knowledge of the battery status, you are able to craft web content and applications which are power-efficient, thereby leading to improved user experience.
#5 — OpenSignal
A global tool used to find insight into the coverage and performance of Mobile Operators worldwide. OpenSignal’s data is crowdsourced by users of the OpenSignal app which constantly monitors the coverage and performance of their mobile connections. They use this data to increase transparency in the wireless industry by publishing reports on the quality of mobile networks, offering unbiased coverage maps.
BONUS TOOL → Chrome Dev Tools
This is a tool we didn’t actually write down at Offline Camp but is still totally worth mentioning here. You can use Chrome Dev Tools to utilize network conditioning, which allows you to test your site on a variety of network connections and you can even build custom throttles to emulate your audiences primary conditions. This feature is very useful for testing your application’s performance under varying (or non-existent) network connectivity.
See any tools on this list that you recognize or have some of your own to add? You can share your favorite Offline First tools, or get advice on new ones, by joining us in the Offline First Slack in the #tools channel.
Editor’s Note: This article is part of series of unconference session recaps submitted by the awesome folks who participated in our first ever Offline Camp, a unique tech retreat that brings together the Offline First community. You can find more coverage of our initial discussions in our Medium publication. To continue the conversation, join us at our next event or sign up for updates and cast your vote on where we should host future editions of Offline Camp.
