Libraries of Note: Sharing Open Source Code From the Guardian Mobile Innovation Lab’s Storytelling experiments

A guide to nearly all of the code written during two years of experimentation with mobile-first storytelling formats.

Alastair Coote
Apr 30, 2018 · 5 min read
Photo by Ahmad Ardity / Pixaby

We wrote a lot of code in the two years of the mobile lab and, wherever possible, we open sourced that code to support our team’s mission of openness and collaboration, so that others can use it, learn from it, or just satisfy their curiosity by working out how we did something. But GitHub isn’t the easiest place to discover which code does what, so for posterity, here’s a quick rundown of the most noteworthy code we’ve published, with notes about what each does.

Service Workers

worker-commands

node-service-worker

If you wanted to use it for something similar, you might find a use for…

node-service-worker-proxy

SWWebView

Push Messaging

pushkin

After using it for a few experiments (Brexit results and monthly US jobs report) we found that it wasn’t as reliable as we wanted. Some pushes took a long time to be delivered (if they were delivered at all) and we struggled to work out why. So in the end, we abandoned it in favour of…

pushkin-firebase

It is Node based, and comes with a Dockerfile for those who want to run it on something like the Amazon Elastic Container service, which is what we did.

pushkin-client

Image manipulation

png-pong

It was structured to take advantage of the ReadableStream API to use as little memory as possible, but we ended up not being able to get that functionality ready in time, so for now it has to load the whole image into memory.

png-pong-font

Developer tools

mock-aws-sinon

It’s also had contributions from a few developers outside of the lab, so hopefully it has life in it yet.

treo-promise

Additional developer resources

The Guardian US Mobile Innovation Lab was set up as a small multidisciplinary team housed within the Guardian’s New York newsroom from 2015–2018. Its mission was to explore storytelling and the delivery of news on small screens, and share what they learned. It operated with the generous support of the John S and James L Knight Foundation.

The Guardian Mobile Innovation Lab

An innovation team in the Guardian US newsroom exploring…

The Guardian Mobile Innovation Lab

An innovation team in the Guardian US newsroom exploring storytelling and delivering news on small screens. Funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Alastair Coote

Written by

Doing mobile news-y stuff at @nytimes. Previously of @gdnmobilelab.

The Guardian Mobile Innovation Lab

An innovation team in the Guardian US newsroom exploring storytelling and delivering news on small screens. Funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.