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Write code for the web

mrmr.io

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Re: Write code for the web

#111

Post by idle_zealot »

echelon wrote: post #73
host0 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PWAs, especially those built with an offline-first approach, are so much closer to the native experience than those from half a decade ago. However what concerns me is Google's and Apple's incentives to help them get better to a point where they can rival native apps which could hit their bottom line.

Google and Apple should be regulated to offer the same functionality and performance to the web. Their grip on the most important technology of the century is astounding and harmful. Honestly first-class web mobile installs without hoops and scare walls would be the thing to strive for.

I'm not aware of any scare walls on iOS. On Android is a site is installable a little banner is supposed to pop up and ask if you want to install it. On iOS one has to open the site's share sheet and pick an install option nestled in there somewhere. I suppose that counts as a hoop, but how else would you surface the functionality without it being invasive and annoying for most users?

I think a more pertinent problem is that most devs don't want to distribute their apps as PWAs because Apple deletes saved data at unpredictable intervals and PWAs can't push engagement notifications as effectively as native apps.

When I switched from the Uber PWA to their native app I suddenly started getting bombarded with ads from them in my notifications.

Re: Write code for the web

#113

Post by blashyrk »

aetch wrote: post #12
blitz_skull wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol. Have you ever used their “IDE”? My guess is you haven’t based on the tone of your remark. Apple has been developer-hostile for years, and OP was just synthesizing their thoughts around this and TBH I found the conclusion to be fairly nuanced and apropos.

Lol. Have you ever used Android Studio IDE? The grass always looks greener on the other side but Xcode and iOS development is miles ahead of how slow and unhelpful Android Studio is the majority of the time. Don’t even get me started on opening up your app 6 months later to update the code and it’s a 99% chance some Android gradle build system or dependency has changed and broken the build…

I cannot disagree more on just about everything you wrote.

In my experience, Xcode has been terrible, sometimes borderline unusable. The horrible project format, merging pains when working in a team, interface builder being trash in general but completely unusable when you use a lot of custom components with @IBDesignable properties across multiple modules - in that scenario it sometimes rebuilds everything in an endless loop, and brings even the most powerful Mac machines to their knees.

In that state even changing a simple property on a view takes 15 seconds of 100% cpu time.

Sure nowadays there's SwiftUI but IMO it can't be considered as anything more than an alpha until they fix the horrible navigation woes. And even then it still uses UIKit under the hood and you can see countless internally used constraints breaking all the time in the logs. At least that's how it was when I tried it a year and a half ago.

And that's not even touching on the cruel joke that is the xcodeproj project format.

Apple didn't even provide a package manager until relatively recently for God's sake. It was left to the community (cocoapods) to fend for themselves in this regard.

Re: Write code for the web

#114

Post by rubymamis »

ederamen wrote: post #107
dgfitz wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve had success with Qt building an app that compiles on Android and iOS. I’m not in the app development business at $dayjob though.

Oh cool - I started looking into Qt a while ago but was confused by their license. Would you recommend it?

The license may look confusing, but it's pretty permissive. I highly recommend Qt. I developed a block editor[1] (similar to Notion) using Qt C++ and QML, and my development experience is pretty great.

[1] https://www.get-plume.com/

Re: Write code for the web

#115

Post by marcosdumay »

coliveira wrote: post #27

Writing for the web would be great if you didn't have to learn a new framework every six weeks because people will not stop coming with new ways to do the same thing over and over again.

You don't have to do any of that. The older options never go away, and don't stop working unless they are so complex that they require a working npm-enabled requirements solving. (But then, if they do that, they are best avoided anyway.)

Re: Write code for the web

#117

Post by airstrike »

BuyMyBitcoins wrote: post #59

Years ago I decided to delve into learning Swift and native iOS development. I simply could not get accustomed to using XCode. The UI/UX of XCode is atrocious in a way that I’m struggling to articulate. I found myself constantly opening and closing panels just to click on icons that weren’t intuitively grouped together. To open one panel would forcefully minimize the other. It’s like a tenth of my time was dedicated…

IMHO XCode is both great and terrible. I miss it when I'm in vscode, but I also hate it when I'm in XCode, if that makes sense?

It's like a heavy IDE of yore, which means the more you comply with it, the more you'll enjoy it—but that also leaves a feeling that you're not really in control.

It's definitely worse than it could be if Apple cared enough to make it half as snappy as vscode feels. The shitty support for vim keybindings alone makes me furious (e.g you can't redo most actions like "c" or "r")

Finally, I'm not sure if you were using SwiftUI back then or if you were fighting with storyboards in UIKit. The latter is an ATROCIOUS experience I wouldn't wish upon my worst enemy. SwiftUI in comparison feels like the future, even if it's still in its early days and some stuff needs to be ironed out

Re: Write code for the web

#118

Post by DotaFan »

berkes wrote: post #104
DotaFan wrote: post #61

Native stack is tailored for native devices, using web for that is just not as reliable/maintainable/cost efficient in my opinion. Sure, you can have less devs to support both platforms, but as soon as you need some hardware functionalities, you're not gonna have much of an options, besides what web tech libs you have in the store.

But a surprisingly large amount of apps don't need hardware functionalities or could easily provide (most of) their value without them. Sure, some high end games. But they're more an exception. What other app are you thinking of?

This is true, if it's basic app I'd certainly recommend web technology. But it's also true that clients many times don't know what they want and where they're heading. So, before we decide on tech, I do analyze with my clients what are their plans for the future with the app. It does pan out many of them would like to have notifications, storage, camera, offline..

Re: Write code for the web

#119

Post by bmitc »

motoxpro wrote: post #96
bmitc wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't that it was not supported. It is that Apple is openly antagonistic to and actively blocks anything that isn't theirs. And you also left out key information. I don't have any issues with the same development on Windows or Linux. Apple is the outlier and isn't doing some reasonable thing. Apple is by far the most troublesome platform to develop for. They literally make you do it their way, and you cannot reco…

I agree with the GP. I feel like you're trying to walk into a steakhouse and ask for pancakes KNOWING it was a steakhouse before you went in. Pancakes are great, but it says steakhouse right on the sign that says "We sell steak and nothing else"

The analogy doesn't work.

It's not like Apple provides their platform and then if you don't want to use it then fine, you're on your own. They are actively hostile towards you doing something else.

If I leap off your analogy, which again doesn't really work, it's as if they throw tomatoes from their steakhouse as you go towards the pancake house.

Re: Write code for the web

#120

Post by ip26 »

dtagames wrote: post #79

This author seems confused about something that he, himself explains. The reason that Apple doesn't care about developers is that they have created such a walled garden cult w/ users that developers are forced to produce products for their platform or they lose half their market -- or more. At my day job in mobile game development (for a small studio inside a large company), we have to fight Apple constantly -- not o…

Your description is basically aggregation theory in practice.
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