velcro

Any tips for something solid vanguard-like in the EU?

Sure it does - even if you totally ignore the fact that the same AMP page is loading quite a bit of JS, that its almost double the size and double the number of requests - you're assuming that all requests are cached and thats not correct.

For the Youtube AMP component alone some of those requests are "no-cache" cookie/ads/other types + if nothing else, its also loading the video cover image i.e. effectively starting the video iframe in the background.

Which is as mentioned not ideal since the video is in a hidden inline popup thats used only by 40% of the visitors. Our main page loads and executes all of this on click/user-interaction first so ideally I'd like to be able to set how this behaves in an AMP component too. If that loads from cache afterwards - even better. But it shouldn't upfront and I can't influence it easily.

BTW fun fact - all popups/galleries/sliders/menus/animations on the page are done without JavaScript - none whatsoever (excluding pre-loading large images). They use clever new CSS techniques instead. Just for fun - we tried to go completely JS-free, but Youtube/iframe was the only problem because it was preloading everything on start (and we tried various hacks from various nested display:none; stuff to switching iframes for objects, etc.). Plus/minus Google Analytics of course.

So its quite a contrast - on one hand going JS-free, but then on another loading an insane amount of JS for the AMPed version :)

AMP is of course mostly meant for articles - but we wanted to see how it did for complex(er) layouts. Had a weekend hackathon to recode our main one-pager for performance and SEO recently + we also did an AMP version of the page at http://pag.es

The AMP version of the site is (as expected) not as performant as our custom optimised one. AMP version will load 1.2MB+ of data with 28+ requests, while ours makes due with half of that and 0.6MB with 17 requests. Some of that is due to AMP components that could be a bit more optimised (like we have a hidden youtube video that launches on click - and the youtube AMP component will load all of it dependencies on first start which is not ideal - our custom version does this when the user clicks/launches the video).

However - the new site release did wonders for SEO. Its probably not all due to just having an AMP version, but also just having a good mobile/optimised site - we still landed on 1./2./3. google search page results for some fairly generic terms. Really surprised us - kind of shocking actually, especially since we did little with the page before and didn't have that many inbound links, etc...

Takes me back to the time of Netscape 2.0 where webpages were not complete without a fire.gif background :)

BTW did a pure CSS3 fire a while ago too: http://pag.es/fire/test.html

The animation quality is really bad i.e. jerky. The best advice for smooth animation is to leave DOM alone as much as you can.

1) cache all that you can in variables (i.e. not only cache DOM access but group/batch it). 2) implement requestAnimationFrame. but most of all 3) don't animate top/left properties - instead work with GPU-accelerated ones like transform (not only will they perform faster as no reflows/pains are needed - but the movement will also be sub-pixel i.e. smoother)

I'm Croatian... don't know about the rumor you mentioned (but apparently it wasn't such a huge controversy that I'd know about it :D)... however - Rimac cars apparently has some well known and public investors

http://www.rimac-automobili.com/press/rimac-automobili-close...

Oh ok - thought you had your countries mixed up but now you're just trying to dig yourself out of the gutter. You need to check your facts on multiple things you've written.

Its true that most refugees are trying to make it to Germany - but if Germany closes its doors, they wouldn't get stuck in the immediate neighbouring countries - they'd get returned to the point of where they were first registered in the EU. Since Greece is not doing that at all - this would for most of them now be Croatia. Which is for example what Slovenia is preparing for (google "border razor wire slovenia") under the pretence of "defending" the Schengen border (even though its just something like 70km through Slovenian territory from Croatia to Austria). So granting passage for Croatia is not an easy decision to make.

You dismiss granting passage as something any country could do - yet Croatia is the only willing/open corridor now since Hungary has closed it doors completely and they're clearly not welcome in Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia who openly oppose any EU quotas. No word on any of that in Croatia - who has already started building shelters for the EU quotas and has indeed already accepted refugees wanting to stay there (even though most of them want to continue on to Germany).

None of these have anything to do with your original claim that "Croatia wanted to ban all muslim". In addition to what I wrote I'd go as far as to say that Muslims as a religion are not such an oddity in Croatia - yes, its a predominantly Christian country but it does have a small and thriving muslim community inherited from its close ties with the neighbouring (predominantly muslim) Bosnia (made even closer by the fact that Bosnia and Croatia were mostly fighting on the same side in the last Balkans war against ex-Yu/Serbia).

"Several people told me" is just not a credible reference. Whereas its easy to google and confirm what I've tried to correct you with - again I think you're confusing Croatia with Slovakia (google Slovakia in relation to accepting only Christian refugees).

Yeah - you're definitely remembering wrong or you have your countries mixed up.

Croatia was actually the only (border-) EU country that allowed passage to all refugees (I'm guessing thats what you're referring to) and there was definitely no anti-muslim sentiment or any sort of call to ban all muslims.

Don't think anybody ever thought about anything like that at all in Croatia - people still remember their own armed conflict a decade or so ago.

You probably mean the countries from the Visegrad group (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) - where some parts of the government (in especially Slovakia) were proposing to only accept Catholic refugees (which is also not the same as saying they'd ban all muslims).

Efficiency is a really subjective benchmark. Especially when there are multiple browsers and platforms in play. Look at the WebGL example posted a few comments above - it will very efficiently warm up your GPU :)

Of course the content of a plugin is not a part of the DOM - however you're not calling MP4 videos or webfonts "blackboxes" for not being able to read their source code from the web inspector either...

Particle tests are a dime a dozen. You could have seen the same things in Flash 10 years ago.

BTW I'm on a Mac viewing your (66k polygons) example in Chrome - and my fans started spinning almost a few seconds after opening your link. Five of those running in parallel and my laptop would probably explode.

GPU seems to be going crazy - http://i.imgur.com/t4qC0LJ.png

If you're implying that Flash is using only software-based rendering while WebGL is hardware accelerated - thats not really true. Look it up - Flash has been doing HW acc. for years now across platforms. Its 2015 now and it took WebGL 5 years to get to decent (but not perfect) desktop support - forget about mobile. Same with video - as far as I know Flash does HW acc. video too.

To a developer Flash is not a black box - to a user, again - it seems that that technology gets a lot of blame for what developers are doing with it. If you have 5 animated banners hogging your CPU/GPU, whether in WebGL or Flash - who is to blame?

A colleague of mine was a very vocal anti-Flash proponent - he used to say that he's tired of his laptop overheating from those 5 stupid animated Flash banners (on his favourite news site).

The irony of it is - I'm not sure 5 animated WebGL banners would keep his laptop any cooler...

Bugs are always bad (and security bugs even more so) - but I've always felt that Flash gets a disproportional amount of hate/hype in the media. To some degree it should be normal that the more widespread a technology is - the more it gets targeted for security exploits.

If you run the popular browsers/plugins against the National Vulnerability Database, you'd get the following results (as of January 2014):

  - Internet Explorer 366 total vulnerability issues (314 high severity)

  - Google Chrome 235 total vulnerability issues (154 high severity)

  - Adobe Flash 207 total vulnerability issues (169 high  severity)

  - Mozilla Firefox 190 total vulnerability issues (86 high severity)

  - Oracle Java 161 total vulnerability issues (69 high severity)

[source] https://nvd.nist.gov/

Taxes really are quite high - not sure how good of an indicator for this is tax to GDP ratio though.

A lot of the people frequenting HN are (usually) well off IT workers - so I find the following list quite telling - it shows an effective income tax and social security rates on USD $100,000 of gross income (based on KPMG 2012 global tax rate survey): http://imgur.com/MUZlz

Note that the amounts in the article are not factually correct. Its really not $138. Its actually:

A.) max. 2500kn (croatian kuna) or $367 USD for singles B.) max. 1250kn or $183 per household member (so for families of 4 it would be $183 x 4)

This is obviously for the poorest of the society that have had their accounts blocked for debt longer than 360 days. Most working people in Croatia would not be able to meet that criteria - minimal state-imposed gross salary for 2015 is 3030kn ($445 USD). People also tend to mix net and gross amounts (everything salary-related in Croatia is usually presented as a gros amount - while in the US/EU its usually net). Not an insignificant difference because Croatia has some of the highest taxes in the world.

Source: https://servisi.fina.hr/otpis-duga-javna-objava/info

Yup - probably for legal reasons. They can't claim someone else's insolvency before MtGox makes it official...

Have to say the BTC price is holding remarkably well considering - maybe because the mainstream media hasn't picked up on it yet - but still...

I'll try not taking it the wrong way even though you're assuming that I'd be making low quality apps :) even though you don't really know my level of experience.

I was talking about doing specific niche apps by limiting their feature-set, not their quality.

Yeah, its definitely a weird calculation I know. Was just curious if an average "small" app makes anything at all or not...

My definition of small is even stricter than yours :) I'd say something that you'd be able to make in 2 weekends - like lottery/weather apps (of course both of these have been done to death - but in that general direction). I'm not expecting those to make anyone rich - just curious if something like that could make nothing, 10$ per month, 100$, etc...

Like just from appstore exposure and no marketing... but lets assume that all the apps would be decent looking and programmed to work nicely - just with a limited feature set... and maybe a mix of appstores if I develop them in something thats able to do cross-platform compiles...

Is this an average of all of your apps? Or a minimum per app?

I've also noticed that you started doing more iOS apps towards the end of the year. Is this because (as some people previously reported) iOS apps tend to generate a lot more sales currently? i.e. could you compare different stores in terms of the number of sales?

Thanks!

Very nice work Dave - one thing thats probably a more interesting question - can you make a living on that? Making many small apps?

Have also been toying with an idea to start doing apps for a while now and rather than do a major idea, instead do many small apps. Like for example if 1 app brings 100$ per month - then making 20 could make 2000$ and so on - but does 1 app make 100$ on average at all?

Huh? Odd interpretations all around then - I thought I was blaming the media?

In my ignorance I must have interpreted the article like this: 1. Communism = bad, 2. all Communist people lazy = Communism doomed to fail, 3. big Western company comes bringing enlightenment but people no want jobs (couldn't possible have anything to do with lousy pay = must mean communists be lazy), 4. everybody knows in capitalism people work incredibly productively 8 hours per day - except those crazy Yugoslavs

Blame it on the communism still goes hand in hand with the era when the article was published, but today...? Really - "a Yugoslavian problem"?

EDIT (after your edit): Also - where do I say or assume that a lot of US citizens are not well-travelled? Please read again...

Truth be told this article is exactly why a lot of (mostly untraveled) people from the US have a really distorted view of the rest of the world.