29 ms·

Building SoundCloud Mobile with Backbone.js

36 points by jashkenas 15y ago

jashkenas 15y ago
A question for the Matas and the SoundCloud folks: If you upgraded to Backbone 0.5.0+, would you use the built-in pushState support, or would you still need additional functionality that your custom routing provides?
- jzaefferer 15y ago
  Upgrade to 0.5.x is on the roadmap, along with some other housekeeping. That should replace our custom backbone-history completely, just need a way to trigger an event on pushState that other components can handle.
Pewpewarrows 15y ago
> A common and frustrating use-case was mobile Twitter: Someone would share a new favorite or upload on Twitter, you tap on it, and it tried to load the regular site on your tiny smartphone screen. Pushing the whole desktop site over a mobile connection would be a waste of precious bandwidth, if you only want to check out a track. Alternatively we could try to redirect to our native apps, but there’s no guarantee that the user has it installed and the mobile vendors don’t offer any APIs for verifying that in advance. Somewhat off-topic, but for any devs interested: Android allows you to do that. From your native app, you can essentially hook into whenever the user tries to open a URL that looks like your site (soundcloud.com, etc), and through the Intent system the OS will offer the user the option of opening that URL through your application. From there you can parse the URL, see what they were trying to look at, and dive deep into the app to whatever screen (Activity) makes sense for that content. Here's an example from StackOverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2448213/how-to-implement-my-very-own-uri-schema-on-android/2448531#2448531 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2448213/how-to-implement-... I'm not as familiar with iOS, so I don't know if something similar exists for that environment.
meta 15y ago
I am very curious about this: "To implement the remaining presentation logic, we used the route suggested by Backbone.js, preparing the data for output in the Model’s toJSON method." I don't quite know why you would toJSON the model for the view vs. just accessing the models members via .escape() when you need them. Has anyone else used the toJSON function to format models for output to a view?
- jzaefferer 15y ago
  We use that for example for formatting a timestamp into an "5 hours ago" format.

36 points by jashkenas 15y ago

A question for the Matas and the SoundCloud folks: If you upgraded to Backbone 0.5.0+, would you use the built-in pushState support, or would you still need additional functionality that your custom routing provides?

jzaefferer 15y ago
Upgrade to 0.5.x is on the roadmap, along with some other housekeeping. That should replace our custom backbone-history completely, just need a way to trigger an event on pushState that other components can handle.

Pewpewarrows 15y ago

> A common and frustrating use-case was mobile Twitter: Someone would share a new favorite or upload on Twitter, you tap on it, and it tried to load the regular site on your tiny smartphone screen. Pushing the whole desktop site over a mobile connection would be a waste of precious bandwidth, if you only want to check out a track. Alternatively we could try to redirect to our native apps, but there’s no guarantee that the user has it installed and the mobile vendors don’t offer any APIs for verifying that in advance. Somewhat off-topic, but for any devs interested: Android allows you to do that. From your native app, you can essentially hook into whenever the user tries to open a URL that looks like your site (soundcloud.com, etc), and through the Intent system the OS will offer the user the option of opening that URL through your application. From there you can parse the URL, see what they were trying to look at, and dive deep into the app to whatever screen (Activity) makes sense for that content. Here's an example from StackOverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2448213/how-to-implement-my-very-own-uri-schema-on-android/2448531#2448531 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2448213/how-to-implement-... I'm not as familiar with iOS, so I don't know if something similar exists for that environment.

meta 15y ago

I am very curious about this: "To implement the remaining presentation logic, we used the route suggested by Backbone.js, preparing the data for output in the Model’s toJSON method." I don't quite know why you would toJSON the model for the view vs. just accessing the models members via .escape() when you need them. Has anyone else used the toJSON function to format models for output to a view?

jzaefferer 15y ago
We use that for example for formatting a timestamp into an "5 hours ago" format.