Using Thimble with Limited Internet Connectivity

Mozilla

Are you among the more than 100,000 people who have used Thimble since we re-launched it at the end of August? If not, we hope you’ll check it out! It has a lot of great new features that we think you and your learners will love. We’ve seen a fantastic diversity of user projects on subjects like Henrietta Lacks, Ada Lovelace, and trends in Brooklyn.
Did you know that in the new Thimble, you can create entire websites inside one project? Moreover, you can export projects with any number of pages and files (including images) as a .zip and run the project from your machine in spaces with limited or no internet connectivity.
If you work as an advocate, educator, or organizer, this means that you can create and share an entire kit or unit through Thimble for others to remix and localize online or off. This also means that you can drag and drop files back and forth between your Thimble project and a GitHub repo to make your work accessible to users on Thimble who may not be ready to fork or make a pull request. You can see an example of a web literacy training workshop built like this inside Thimble here.
We also landed a patch that prevents Thimble from crashing on networks with slower network connections. And we added resumeable file syncing with the server. This means if your network goes down, Thimble will do the right thing when it comes back again.
Finally, we’re working on some optimizations to make sure this never happens again:

We got Thimble up and running again pretty quickly:

But we want to make sure we don’t leave any learners Thimble-less, even for a short while. We wouldn’t want to miss out on things like this:

Or this:

Or this:

Altogether, these recent changes mean Thimble is better than ever, especially for learners in spaces with limited or no connectivity.
Are there new features you’d like to see in Thimble? Feel free to tweet at us @MozTeach, or just file a ticket in our Github repo.