Nieman Foundation at Harvard
HOME
          
LATEST STORY
A paywall? Not NPR’s style. A new pop-up asks for donations anyway
ABOUT                    SUBSCRIBE
May 28, 2013, 12:46 p.m.

At Smashing Magazine, FT Labs front-end developer Wilson Page details some of the back-end tech behind the Financial Times’ shift from native apps to HTML5 on mobile platforms.

Among the highlights: using flexbox to fill defined vertical space, a JavaScript library called FTEllipsis to manage text flowing in a confined area, icon fonts for retina-ready images, and more natural-feeling scrolling. Much of the new code is open-sourced on the FT Labs GitHub.

We didn’t just want to build a product that fulfilled its current requirements; we wanted to build a foundation that we could innovate on in the future. This meant building with a maintenance-first mentality, writing clean, well-commented code and, at the same time, ensuring that our code could accommodate the demands of an ever-changing feature set.

Show tags
 
Join the 60,000 who get the freshest future-of-journalism news in our daily email.
A paywall? Not NPR’s style. A new pop-up asks for donations anyway
“I find it counterproductive to take a cynical view on tactics that help keep high-quality journalism freely accessible to all Americans.”
The story of InterNation, (maybe) the world’s first investigative journalism network
Long before the Panama Papers and other high-profile international projects, a global network of investigative journalists collaborated over snail mail.
Want to boost local news subscriptions? Giving your readers a say in story ideas can help
“By providing a service that answers questions posed by audience members, audiences are more likely to reciprocate through subscriptions.”