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Wavacity – a FOSS port of Audacity to the web
51–60 of 148 posts
Re: Wavacity – a FOSS port of Audacity to the web
#52We'll need to stop calling web browsers web browsers.
We need to split the web into documents and apps, in my opinion. We still don't have a standard HTML text editor, instead relying on hundreds of Incompatible WYSIWYG editors which all produce custom output, or worse (much, much worse) the abomination that is MarkDown. Every browser should be an editor which all produce standardized output. In 2023, we're still relying on asterisk, hash marks and underscores to format…
>We still don't have a standard HTML text editor
Notepad.
Re: Wavacity – a FOSS port of Audacity to the web
#53Alright, it's at a kind of uncanny valley situation where we have Windows XP applications running real-time in our browsers. Is the end-game just a universal sandboxed VM that's cross-platform? What do we do next?
For better or for worse, that's what Google is aiming at with ChromeOS. Especially now that the overarching "OS" is really just a Linux shell for multiple VMs. https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/main/docs/l...
FWIW: native audacity (literally the debian package) runs in ChromeOS as a wayland/somellier client from crostini. Basically everything not tied to particular driver or hardware environments runs great.
The whole OS is really the best "app fusion" desktop environment out there. I've got Android apps for Threads and Tesla running alongside all the web apps you'd expect to find. I've got my personal email via linux Thunderbird. I read my PDFs in Evince (because, let's be honest, both the Chrome and Adobe readers are junk) and it integrates with the native ChromeOS Files app like a normal app. In fact all the Gnome .desktop files in the Crostini personality appear as apps in the OS menu that can be associated with files types or pinned to the shelf, so there's a surprising amount of scriptability to the process. Likewise it makes a great X terminal for shells and emacs windows from development machines.
In fact I've moved (to be fair: for professional reasons, and I resisted for quite a while) to a mid-tier junky old Chromebook for basically all my client activity at this point (windows games being the sole exception). Really it's pretty great. The proverbial year of Linux on the desktop arrived and won while we were all looking elsewhere.
Re: Wavacity – a FOSS port of Audacity to the web
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
For better or for worse, that's what Google is aiming at with ChromeOS. Especially now that the overarching "OS" is really just a Linux shell for multiple VMs. https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/main/docs/l...
People often claim that ChromeOS is versatile enough to replace a normal computer because it has these various compatibility layers. They often fail to mention that they work terribly . You wind up with the poor performance and annoying isolation that VMs give, but with an extra helping of instability and incompatibility. Running anything Google hasn't approved is gated behind "developer mode", and even for a develop…
> Running anything Google hasn't approved is gated behind "developer mode", and even for a developer the pseudo-Debian container "developer mode" unlocks is confusing.
This is mixed up. "Developer mode" is a firmware mode that allows you to run unsigned images. You use that if you want to hack your ChromeOS image itself. The Linux development environment feature (crostini) runs in a VM on any chromebook, it doesn't require developer mode or any firmware features. Technologically it's basically the same thing as WSL, though integrated much better with the OS UI.
Re: Wavacity – a FOSS port of Audacity to the web
#55Alright, it's at a kind of uncanny valley situation where we have Windows XP applications running real-time in our browsers. Is the end-game just a universal sandboxed VM that's cross-platform? What do we do next?
Fun fact: when you don't give a shit about whether your UI looks like what "the OS looks like" (no offense to Tantacrul, but audacity clearly doesn't), you can get a surprising amount of work done. This isn't a Windows XP application, it looked like this well before Windows XP existed.
As a game dev I haven't seen an app (except browser and terminal) that looks like the OS native UI for quite a while.
Blender, Houdini, 3DCoat, Photoshop, Krita, FL Studio, Bitwig... all of them use their own UI widget.
Re: Wavacity – a FOSS port of Audacity to the web
#56Wow this is just incredible! Seeing this and software like photopea I can now start to feel that HTML has become powerful enough that almost any desktop app can now be built for the web just as same.
A lot of people/companies tried their best to impede this progress (1) for promoting app stores but I'm so glad we are finally getting there regardless. Better late than never!
(1) https://thenewstack.io/apples-browser-engine-ban-is-holding-...
Re: Wavacity – a FOSS port of Audacity to the web
#57The page loads fairly quickly, I guess most people miss out the loading screen with the link to the github repo: https://github.com/ahilss/wavacity So yes, this is a WebAssembly app. It loads a 5.2MB .wasm file and 2.3MB .data file. Neat, isn't it?
Also impressive is that is smaller than every other release artifact:
https://github.com/audacity/audacity/releases
Re: Wavacity – a FOSS port of Audacity to the web
#58Very cool. Seems like there is just tons of potential for more full-fledged open-source software to turn into web apps using WASM.
Re: Wavacity – a FOSS port of Audacity to the web
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
On reddit at least it seems like everyone under a certain age doesn't use the term at all and just calls everything, including websites, an app.
Back in the 80s, when 90% of software development consisted of using a database and the tooling provided by the database supplier, and creating a front end to enter/edit/view the database contents, the results were called "applications". In the 2020s, when 90% of software development consists of using a database, tooling supplied by various open source projects and some choice of web front- and backends to create a f…
For most companies, the real application is the database. Everything else is just a UI to view/edit the database contents.
Re: Wavacity – a FOSS port of Audacity to the web
#60Wow, this is incredible! I was not expecting it to work on mobile Safari of all things, but it does! The UI is even usable. Audacity is an indispensable utility. It’s great to see it and other “real” software on the web. I’m reminded of Photopea[1] which is a web clone of Photoshop. [1]: https://www.photopea.com/
I agree that it running on mobile safari is incredible - I wouldn’t call the UI ‘usable’ though, it’s a straight duplicate of the desktop UI, which isn’t geared for mobile by any stretch of the imagination, and is actually unusable on my iPhone due to (I assume) far too small a clickable area for most controls.
A UI rework to incorporate mobile-friendly design would be a ton of effort, but it would really take this project to the next level!