The Current State of Blitz

Published by Jiminy Panoz on July 1, 2020.

All repositories reached End Of Life on July 1, 2020. The Blitz project is no longer maintained and its repositories are read-only. You can still fork them if they can be useful to you.

This page sums up the last features implemented in 2020.

For a 2019 overview, please check The State of Blitz in 2019.

Sunsetting Blitz

Regardless of the reasons, it’s time to move on for the maintainers of the Blitz Project. 2019 releases were primarily possible because people stepped in, and it’s time to pass the torch.

All active projects in the Blitz workspace will be end-of-lifed in 2020, within 4 months, starting March 1st. This means that on July 1st, we will archive the repos to preserve them for current and future forks, but they will be read-only and no longer actively maintained.

For further details, please check the sunsetting roadmap that has been laid out in a meta issue on GitHub.

For the improvements and fixes that were made in 2020 before taking this decision, please see the sections below.

A Checklist Template

The companion apps had been sharing a lot of code, and it was high time to address this issue.

Blitz Checklist was created to facilitate maintenance and updates in the existing Blitz Checklists, and designed as a boilerplate anyone can use to create such web apps – with interactions, offline support, etc.

Blitz Checklist is using the Mustache logic-less template, which means separating data from markup, and making it easier to use in a non-web context as well.

And it proved very useful as it helped implement new features and bug fixes more quickly.

Design and Optim Apps Bumped to Version 2

The ebook performance and ebook design checklists were bumped to version 2 following the creation of Blitz Checklist.

The following improvements were rolled out:

  • Service Workers handle all critical files explictly;
  • checked boxes are handled when printing the checklist;
  • help instructions are a proper modal;
  • it’s possible to expand/collapse all details;
  • homescreen icon and splash screen are handled correctly on Android 8+.

Every precaution was taken in the migration to make sure this breaking change is workable for people who cloned or forked the existing checklists.

Indeed, we designed this template in a way that makes Mustache (hence JSON) entirely optional. As long as you follow the templating rules in index.html, everything should be fine.

If you don’t want to migrate to version 2 and are more comfortable with the idea of manually maintaining your fork/clone of the checklists, then you can use the v.1.0.4 tag in your fork and backport the improvements that were made.

CSS Tricks App Bumped to Version 1

Finally, ebook Tricks was put on par with the other companion apps. Unfortunately, Blitz ebook Tricks couldn’t leverage the Blitz Checklist template, but it was updated and bumped to version 1 nevertheless.

This new version brought:

  • copy CSS snippet to clipboard in one click;
  • smooth scroll for nav menu;
  • print CSS improvements;
  • better handling of homescreen icon and splash screen on Android 8+.

In the end, it didn’t necessarily sound like much, but should have made it a lot easier to use Blitz ebook Tricks in production.