TIL: You can access a user’s camera with just HTML
121–130 of 240 posts
Re: TIL: You can access a user’s camera with just HTML
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for saying this, as I know a lot of people on HN have very negative feelings towards this trend. Personally, I feel the browser is a great way to stop reinventing the wheel, and the APIs abstract away a lot of the heavy lifting. They pretty much get you 80% of the way there, and the last 20% is where you can really add the stamp of "uniqueness" to your implementation. The fact that the browser is also heavily…
It just feels like every time software developers can't (or won't) build things cross-platform, users end up with bigger and bloatier solutions and poorer experiences. First, it was cross-platform UI toolkits and OS abstractions like Qt (require users to use a big, "lowest common denominator compromise" library ) Then, it was web apps (require users to provide a browser) Then, it was Electron and friends (ship the wh…
> Ship an entire physical PC to the user pre-loaded with the application?
I'm going to guess that there will be a few intermediate steps, with the additional goal of removing rights to your own computer.
After Docker and containers, an image for a virtual machine, to provide a kernel and not just the libraries.
After virtual machines, a connection to a remote machine, to avoid downloading the entire image and reduce your first-use bandwidth.
After connections to remote machines, a "co-located server", with an abstraction layer between using the remote machine to reduce first-use bandwidth and using the machine in your house to reduce latency.
Which is all to say that I wouldn't be surprised if it happened that way over the next 10-20 years, resulting in you renting the computer that sits in your own house.
Re: TIL: You can access a user’s camera with just HTML
#123A lot of totally valid opinions out there about this, but I personally _love_ how the browser is becoming a very well-featured sandbox for shipping applications. For personal fun and learning, I'm making a complete 2D video game in ideally less than 1MB. It has 60fps graphics, full spatial audio, and gamepad support, all because the browser has a lot of these APIs that didn't exist when I was starting out my career.…
Thanks for saying this, as I know a lot of people on HN have very negative feelings towards this trend. Personally, I feel the browser is a great way to stop reinventing the wheel, and the APIs abstract away a lot of the heavy lifting. They pretty much get you 80% of the way there, and the last 20% is where you can really add the stamp of "uniqueness" to your implementation. The fact that the browser is also heavily…
> Personally, I feel the browser is a great way to stop reinventing the wheel
This is an optimistic take on the near- and mid-term evolution of software. What makes you think that working inside the browser will stop wheel reinvention? Have you not tracked the endless reinvention of "the right way" to do interactive app development inside the browser?
Re: TIL: You can access a user’s camera with just HTML
#124This is a site that shows the camera feed full screen and inverts in with css https://nega.radioac.dev/ I hacked it together in half an hour to give people a way to look at the uninverted version of my inverted analogue photos with their phones at exhibitions. most people were more excited to play with it on their phone than by the photos I took days making. :'( [edit oops this javascript ]
Note that this uses the JavaScript MediaDevices API to stream the camera, which is different from OP's link (which is a file picker input that launches the mobile camera instead of going to the photo gallery)
However, ‘filter: invert(1)’ on top of the OP’s approach should do the same.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/filter-func...
Re: TIL: You can access a user’s camera with just HTML
#125I’m getting a Cloudflare rate limit warning. I didn’t know this was a thing.
It's not just proxying the site, it's using https://workers.cloudflare.com/
Re: TIL: You can access a user’s camera with just HTML
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for saying this, as I know a lot of people on HN have very negative feelings towards this trend. Personally, I feel the browser is a great way to stop reinventing the wheel, and the APIs abstract away a lot of the heavy lifting. They pretty much get you 80% of the way there, and the last 20% is where you can really add the stamp of "uniqueness" to your implementation. The fact that the browser is also heavily…
It just feels like every time software developers can't (or won't) build things cross-platform, users end up with bigger and bloatier solutions and poorer experiences. First, it was cross-platform UI toolkits and OS abstractions like Qt (require users to use a big, "lowest common denominator compromise" library ) Then, it was web apps (require users to provide a browser) Then, it was Electron and friends (ship the wh…
> Ship an entire physical PC to the user pre-loaded with the application?
A phone (hi iOS), a video game console, a smart appliance, etc. are examples of this.
Building cross platform, native applications is expensive (comparatively) to building web applications.
I made an FM synthesizer in the browser using WASM and the webaudio api just for personal use. I wouldn't have made it if I had to write it as a native app, because native apps are a time sink and annoyance to me (I mean, I'm on linux anyways. I probably have to use either GTK or QT anyways!!!)
Demand for software is MASSIVE right now, and making shipping easier, even if the end product isn't as fast, does have value.
Though yeah, I wish Slack was faster too.
Re: TIL: You can access a user’s camera with just HTML
#127I can't get over the fact, that he is using "a public internet URL" to tunnel the traffic to his local server, just to watch it on his phone.
What he should have done:
- Make his local server listen on his local ip like >:3000 instead of just 127.0.0.1:3000
- Connect his cellphone to his local lan with wifi.
- Look at the site on >:3000 on his cellphone.
I would never make a connection from a public Domain to my local machine just to test something. It's just too risky.
Re: TIL: You can access a user’s camera with just HTML
#128A lot of totally valid opinions out there about this, but I personally _love_ how the browser is becoming a very well-featured sandbox for shipping applications. For personal fun and learning, I'm making a complete 2D video game in ideally less than 1MB. It has 60fps graphics, full spatial audio, and gamepad support, all because the browser has a lot of these APIs that didn't exist when I was starting out my career.…
I personally _love_ how the browser is becoming a very well-featured sandbox for shipping applications.
For me the big thing holding it back is IndexedDB.
Actually in the process of designing a software solution that needs to work on desktop and mobile, and be able to write mission critical data while offline.
As much as I'd love to just make one responsive web app - I just can't trust the safari or even chrome browsers to not /dev/null users data if it feels like it.
Re: TIL: You can access a user’s camera with just HTML
#129"This website has been temporarily rate limited" TIL you shouldn't run a blog on Cloudflare Workers due to rate limiting.
This only applies to the free plan[0] - Higher plans work for excessive RPS, but of course it'll balloon your bill with millions of requests.
Given this is a blog, a better solution would've been Cloudflare Pages[1], which is their own static site hosting service and provides unlimited requests/bandwidth for free.
0: https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/pricing/
Re: TIL: You can access a user’s camera with just HTML
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
It just feels like every time software developers can't (or won't) build things cross-platform, users end up with bigger and bloatier solutions and poorer experiences. First, it was cross-platform UI toolkits and OS abstractions like Qt (require users to use a big, "lowest common denominator compromise" library ) Then, it was web apps (require users to provide a browser) Then, it was Electron and friends (ship the wh…
> Ship an entire physical PC to the user pre-loaded with the application? Ironically, that’s essentially what IBM did with mainframes. Another example of what’s old is new again.
Eh? Mainframes are and always were general purpose computers, and run stufd like Linux just fine.
Nowadays they are mainly meant as machines with extreme reliability guarantees, from things like running multiple processors in lockstep to detect spontaneous processor errors, but they're still just computers.
While their cost makes them hugely impractical for .øst usecases, mainframes do have some really cool tech, including their new CPU designs with quite interesting cache layouts.