A web app in 10k? Surely not!
When @stueccles first encouraged me to enter the 10k apart competition (to create a web app in under 10 kilobytes) I wondered what was really possible in only 10k. After a little tinkering I realised quite a lot.
Introducing the 10k Feed Board
Drawing inspiration from the recently released Flipboard app on the iPad I set about building an app that allowed you to browse Flickr photos and Twitter searches. You can configure a set of panels with different search criteria, choosing from either a Flickr search, Flickr set or a Twitter search. The app then makes use of Yahoo’s YQL service to retrieve the data and populate the panels for you to navigate around. It takes advantage of the new localStorage feature of HTML 5 compliant browsers to persist your queries, meaning that you can come back time and again without losing your search terms. The drawback here, of course, is that you need a modern browser for it to work – Sorry all you IE users – looks like you’ll have to upgrade to a proper browser (IE9 Dev Preview,Firefox or a WebKit browser)!
Take a look at the 10k Feed Board here.
Beyond the 10k limit
With the competition’s 10 kilobyte restrictions I had to limit the content types to Flickr photos and Twitter searches but I will be taking the concept further to include RSS and Atom feed content – it will then become a nice new way to consume all your feed content.
I will also shortly be blogging about the technical aspects of the app – localStorage; how to consume YQL data; and the associated problems of dealing with multiple feed types.