Surf by Osmosis, a 10K Web App

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This week I submitted an entry to 10K Apart, a contest sponsored by the fine folks at MIX and An Event Apart challenging web designers and developers to craft an HTML5-based application under 10 kilobytes in total file size (minus a few forgiven resources like jQuery and Typekit). Entries must be compatible with Firefox, either Safari or Chrome, and the Internet Explorer 9 Developer Preview, but thankfully not IE8 or below.

My entry, titled Surf by Osmosis, shows you the latest top content from Digg, Google News, Twitter and YouTube in as little as a minute, allowing you to absorb today’s trends quickly so you can get on with your life. You can view and comment on my entry on its 10K Apart page.

I took this contest as an opportunity to tackle a few challenges I hadn’t yet mastered, specifically:

Originally I struggled with normalizing the way data was retrieved from the four disparate services, until I realized I could use the speedy and versatile Google AJAX Feed API to grab all of them. This minimized my reliance on outside APIs while leveraging Google’s relative lack of down-time to achieve a speedier experience.

Time-sensitive events turned out to be much less frightening than I thought they would be, at least until I combined them with the initially perplexing canvas drawing methods. Thankfully, the Mozilla Developer Community offers an amazingly helpful animated clock demo I was able to reference and simplify.

Surf by Osmosis went through a few design iterations before I settled on the current look. Unlike most of my projects, I didn’t start in a sketchbook or Photoshop. Due to the technical constraints, I felt my usual design tools would only invite more complexity, and thus more file size.

The original layout was inspired by the simplicity of my friend and colleague Chris Kalani, but the open, fluid composition was more complex to style and animate. Additionally, the lack of a container made the transition between each step feel too jarring and dramatic.

The second iteration was at one time considered “finished.” The fixed container made transitions more predictable and defined a focal point for the viewer, and the multi-layered look of it gave me plenty of opportunities to play with CSS3 gradients and shadows. Much to my dismay, the verbose CSS3 gradient syntax (duplicated for both Mozilla and Webkit compatibility) coupled with the extra logic needed to craft a dimensional animated clock pushed the file size a few kilobytes over the limit, forcing me to simplify.

As is often the case, these technical limitations pushed me to focus my design. In lieu of fancy-shmancy effects, I was now forced to rely on color and typography (specifically FF Cocon Web Pro) to inject Osmosis with personality, and I firmly believe that the end product is better for it. Lesson learned!

Voting appears to be closed as of today. I’m honored to have received an average rating of 4.06 (out of 5) stars with a total of 396 votes, my sincerest thanks to everyone who voted. I’ve already received many wonderful suggestions for how I could expand the application once the contest has ended. If you’d like to see Surf by Osmosis revised and built upon, please let me know.

If you’re curious, my favorite competing entries are probably the addictive canvas game Sinuous and the dead-simple-yet-attractive Inspired By.