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App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

rogueengine.io

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Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#311

Post by steelframe »

acheron wrote: post #225
leptons wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is currently being sued by the DOJ for a variety of abusive business practices, including forcing all web browser apps on iOS to use the Safari browser engine, which limits the usefuleness of all web browsers on iOS, so that developers are forced to develop an app which Apple can then take a 30% cut of all revenue generated by the app. It's a pure money-grab by Apple, and they deserve this legal action against…

Is the only alternative still Google? Yeah I’m good with Apple, thanks.

Point taken about preferring Apple over Google. I buy Pixel phones and immediately install GrapheneOS, which does a pretty good job of keeping Google at arms' length. So I guess the answer to your question is that there is another alternative.

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#313

Post by mmis1000 »

I would if there aren't silly restrictions like rotation lock and fullscreen in safari. You can't even make a app that stay at one direction properly. And fullscreen is limited to video (without any ui control).

Even worse that it limit memory to damn 1gb. So any slightly complex operations will CRASH and restart the whole page.

These basically work in any browser except safari (Not even ie crash and restart your page so often)

These aren't really fancy features only a few people used. It's the bare minimum for anything that is considered "properly working"

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#314

Post by steelframe »

urbandw311er wrote: post #290
adastra22 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what I was saying. Granting the permission to uber.com requires granting the permission first to the browser, then configuring and trusting the browser's own internal per-site restrictions. I don't trust this as much as the more fine grained and configurable OS-level restrictions.

Uber are the worst for abusing this kind of stuff and for dark UX patterns to get you to subscribe to Uber One. I’m repeatedly asked SEVERAL TIMES EVERY TIME I USE THE APP. and there is no way to pause or opt out from this nagging. They even abuse the push notifications to try and sell me stuff as well.

> I’m repeatedly asked SEVERAL TIMES EVERY TIME I USE THE APP.

You know what doesn't do that? The local cab company when I call them to ask for a pick up.

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#315

Post by steelframe »

glitcher wrote: post #139
jbombadil wrote: post #67

As a consumer, I understand the need of a native app for something that is performance intensive or that requires a level of OS access that the website doesn’t provide. OTOH, in tired of everyone pushing apps that could easily be a website. I had an xfinity technician aggressively pushing me to install their xfi app when they came to install the service. They told me it was the only good way to configure the WiFi (!)…

This reminds me of aggressive technicians trying to convince me to install their bloatware on my computer in order to complete setting up internet connectivity 20+ years ago. One was completely baffled by my insistence that he was not going to be touching my computer, makes me laugh now.

> aggressive technicians trying to convince me to install their bloatware on my computer

I still remember the look on the tech's face back around 2002 when he saw a text login prompt on my FreeBSD box.

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#316

Post by codetrotter »

larusso wrote: post #269
Aaargh20318 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On iOS iirc they don't even support adding PWAs to the homescreen? They literally supported this since iPhone OS 1.0 (it wasn’t even called iOS yet). In fact, it was supposed to be the only way to add apps to the iPhone until people complained and started jailbreaking to install their own apps. Apple didn’t release the App Store and the iOS SDK until iPhone OS 2.0

I don’t think parent means the same or maybe he does. On chrome and edge on macOS one can choose to install the PWA as a native app. It gets an app icon and everything. It’s similar to a web bookmark on the HomeScreen. But it’s a sandboxed app. Don’t know if this is the exact same behavior though. PWAs are also a bit different to normal websites. They have a manifest and what not to describe the app in a standardized…

PWAs on iOS get their own local storage, for example. And deleting the PWA from your Home Screen will delete its data, just like deleting an app would delete the data of the app.

I got a basic offline-capable TODO list (the hello world of web apps) working as a PWA for my iPhone. Almost all of it handed to me by ChatGPT.

https://ctsrc.github.io/todo/

If I exit the PWA, turn off WiFi and open the PWA again, the PWA still works.

The only annoying thing is that the way you add a PWA to your Home Screen on iOS is too convoluted to realistically get most people to do it, if you were to make a PWA that you actually wanted people to “install”. Although the JS solution that someone else posted ITT with a small pop-over that explains the steps is pretty near to ok. Certainly helps the situation a bit at least.

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#317

Post by below43 »

xeromal wrote: post #181
tshaddox wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On iOS iirc they don't even support adding PWAs to the homescreen? You've been able to add websites to the home screen going back at least to the iPhone 5 in 2012. Is it the "PWA" part you're questioning? iOS definitely does have PWA support, although with a few notable limitations that may be deal-breakers for certain apps. Oh, and apparently Apple recently disabled PWAs entirely in the EU.

One big missing piece is the inability for me to put an "Install" button like I can on android. I don't want to have to teach old people how to add to desktop

Yes, even Windows (Edge) prompts to install the PWA on the desktop. The "Add to Home Screen" process works well, but is obscure.

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#318

Post by leptons »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #277
leptons wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>HTML alone is not sufficient for a decent looking UI Well that's some nonsense. HTML can absolutely achieve 1:1 on any UI you care to mention. It isn't even difficult if you have any skill at all. >And then there’s JS. And then there's another person who didn't take the time to learn JS and just hates it for reasons . >Rails, htmx, and a few others seem like the only ones who really get that a simple web app should…

> It isn't even difficult if you have any skill at all. Very constructive, thank you. I'm talking about the defaults of HTML. There's no pit of success, just lots of div-wrapping and tweaking until things fall into place. Compare with SwiftUI, where you plop two controls and they're spaced sensibly from one another without you doing anything. This was also the case in VB6. > And then there's another person who didn't…

>There's no pit of success, just lots of div-wrapping and tweaking until things fall into place.

If you don't know what you're doing and plan things out, sure that is what you might expect - but that's a choice. And that's the same in any language or framework or platform. It's possible to write bloated unmaintainable UIs outside of JS/HTML.

>npm is a bit of a madhouse, and JS culture basically consists of "we shove JS everywhere we can and say it is good because it is JS."

Every package manager for every language is a bit of a "madhouse". It's the nature of free software. I'm not sure why you would expect JS programmers to not want to use JS packages, I'm not quite sure how you arrived at this sentiment.

>At 50-100loc, you can have a decent looking native app for a simple task.

Same with Javascript. You might be surprised what can be achieved in a few bytes of Javascript. Ever visit dwitter.net ? I think you're also leaving CSS out of the equation, which has very powerful styling capabilities. 10 or 20 lines of CSS can achieve a lot of UI styling for a simple app. The HTML/CSS/JS combination is very expressive, extremely powerful and easy to use. Not sure how you think it's somehow incapable of UI similar to native applications, without bloat, and easy to implement. I suppose it depends on your skill level with these tools, because I find it extremely easy to do. YMMV.

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#319

Post by leptons »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #280
leptons wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>JS has absolutely no rhyme or reason That's really false. The type coercion matrix does make sense for the job it is supposed to accomplish, even if you personally don't agree with it for whatever your reasons are. https://media.geeksforgeeks.org/wp-content/uploads/advanced-... If you haven't seen the info presented like this before, then I can understand why Javascript might seem "CRAZY" after reading so many blog…

> about a billion blog posts on medium.com. Are you trying to sell JS or not? :) > When I started with Javascript in Netscape in the early 90's, it wasn't as well documented and well supported as it is today. That version of Javascript was a bit rough around the edges Best bug I saw there was how it would sometimes just...give up on running JS if you held it wrong (probably a Netscape thing) and you had to figure out…

I started the project with create-react-app a long time ago. I've since updated it to latest versions of webpack and switched from React to Preact. It's not using any hooks or any modern React conventions, but I don't really need it. I've kept it simple, the only two libraries I include are preact-easy-state and preact-router. Everything else is components I wrote. All images used are SVG, I'm using LESS to compile to CSS, and everything is bundled into a single HTML file that gets gzipped down to about 48KB. I've tweaked the default Webpack configs to get exactly the payload I want. This gets compiled into my ESP32 firmware and served directly from flash. The web app handles all devices configs as well as wifi access point config, and it controls all kinds of device functions using custom sliders and buttons, etc.
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