It’s no secret that visual storytelling matters. And for brands, it’s a requirement. In fact, brands themselves really are the manifestation of the stories they tell. They don’t sell products; they sell stories.
As lightweight versions of native apps, progressive web apps (PWAs) offer a reliable, instantly installable version of traditional apps. This post explains the inner workings of PWAs, describes the best practices for developing PWAs, and clues you in to Cloudinary’s superior capabilities for optimizing rich media for faster load times as part of app content.
Back in April, Cloudinary made available on npm an alpha version of its components library for Svelte, a release that’s a wonderful addition to Cloudinary’s suite of client-side SDKs: React, Vue, and Angular. Those three front-end SDKs offer simple yet comprehensive optimization, transformation, and delivery capabilities for images and videos—features that you can tailor to automatically apply the best-fitting formats for all devices and browsers.
Since its founding in 2012, Cloudinary has released software development kits (SDKs) in over a dozen languages and frameworks, adding feature after feature for numerous technologies. So far, those releases have proceeded in an evolutionary manner. We’re now overhauling them to serve developers even better, starting with the JavaScript (JS) SDK. For details, see our recent post on Cloudinary’s next-generation developer SDKs.
For the past eight years, Cloudinary powered media experience for countless websites and systems worldwide by managing, delivering, and optimizing their media. That’s because Cloudinary’s technology gives you, as developers, capabilities for creating, manipulating, and transforming media on the fly with a self-evident API in the form of a URL.
JavaScript is a popular programming language, typically for building interactive web apps, thanks to its ease of use and ability to run in any browser with no "JavaScript turned off" setting. The language is easy to learn, accelerating app development. However, to avoid performance issues, be sure to optimize your JavaScript apps for media loading. You can do that by adopting techniques for optimizing website images, such as lazy loading.
In February 2018, Cloudinary announced its support of content delivery through CDNs [content delivery networks] in China. With this offering, we announced the ability to support features like automatic format f_auto
, DPR selection dpr_auto
and authentication (using token and cookies). This post elaborates on the CDN options available to you and the related setup requirements.
Attracting visitors to engage with your product videos is an excellent way to boost clickthrough rates, and ultimately, sales. The question is, how do you generate that engagement? Playlists and clickable links come to mind, but generally they appear only after a video has finished playing. For a more captivating user experience, add relevant interactivity throughout the video.
ExoPlayer, a media player for Android, was developed and is being maintained by Google as an alternative for Android’s default MediaPlayer. Among ExoPlayer’s advantages over MediaPlayer are dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP (DASH), smooth streaming, and common encryption. A major advantage, however, is ExoPlayer’s easy customization.
Originally developed for Apple, HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) is a video-streaming protocol, supported by Android and other mobile platforms. HLS uses adaptive bitrate to adjust video quality to each viewer’s internet speed and device capabilities. Presently, HLS is mandatory for live streaming on certain mobile devices and most HTML5 video players.