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Write code for the web

mrmr.io

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Re: Write code for the web

#261

Post by treyd »

chilmers wrote: post #94
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.

The nice thing about the web is that while it’s no company’s favoured platform, it’s valuable to all of them as a way into each other’s platforms. That’s why whoever is “winning” the platform war a particular point tends to neglect the web. See Microsoft in the 2000s, and Apple now. But all their competitors are incentivised to push the web forward, because it’s a useful fallback as a way to get their apps into the w…

> The nice thing about the web is that while it’s no company’s favoured platform

It is effectively Google's favored platform. They effectively get to be the gatekeepers for what standards become accepted. They control the most widely used engine, and fund the only opposition so they have an incentive to avoid going against them. Just look at how everyone dropped the ball in the recent JPEG-XL vs WebP news.

Re: Write code for the web

#262

Post by epistasis »

idle_zealot wrote: post #105
ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #15

Early on, I made the choice to not to invest in learning native mobile development. I focused all my limited time on the web, and I think that, for once, I made the right choice. Today, one can build amazing stuff for the browser. And, in my very humble opinion, the vast majority of apps should've been WebApps — except for maybe Uber, Google Drive, and games. I worked in the journalism business, and, in my country, t…

> except for maybe Uber, Google Drive, and games I understand Drive working better as a native app; it needs to be able to provide a virtual filesystem to the OS and do background syncing and such. But why Uber? Uber has (or maybe had) a mobile site that works fine for requesting rides and basically everything the app can do. I don't see what value Uber being a native app adds for the user. The same goes for most mob…

It's interesting because Apple had to be pressured into even allowing native mobile apps. When the iPhone was launched they told everyone to develop web apps.

Re: Write code for the web

#263

Post by sodapopcan »

rubicon33 wrote: post #191
ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #15

Early on, I made the choice to not to invest in learning native mobile development. I focused all my limited time on the web, and I think that, for once, I made the right choice. Today, one can build amazing stuff for the browser. And, in my very humble opinion, the vast majority of apps should've been WebApps — except for maybe Uber, Google Drive, and games. I worked in the journalism business, and, in my country, t…

I just wish Web wasn't such a frustrating development experience. While it has improved leaps and bounds in the last decade, I still find it to be suboptimal when compared to native offerings. Most of that frustration comes down to tooling and more specifically TypeScript. I'm not sure how to succinctly express my pain here but I have found generally that I wrestle with the type system in TypeScript far more than nat…

Keep your business logic on the server and use whatever language you want. I stick to vanilla JS and only use it for DOM manipulations. I try and leverage CSS for simple manipulations when I can. I don't go out of my way to, but it can do a lot these days.

Re: Write code for the web

#264

Post by coliveira »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #216
bitwize wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be kind of a cult, if Apple products weren't more pleasant and joyous to use by far than any of the alternatives.

They aren't. I find them worse by far than any alternative.

Sorry, but I use Mac and Windows computers (by job requirement). Windows is and has always been clunky and difficult to use. Maybe you don't feel that, but it is a fact. I wound't spend any time with windows if I had a choice.

Re: Write code for the web

#265

Post by steve1977 »

jwells89 wrote: post #242
airstrike wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 vi…

Storyboards are indeed terrible. XIBs are notably better due to not bogging the editor down with N screens but still not great. Both suck for version control being gigantic blobs of machine generated XML. This is why I abandoned storyboards and XIBs in iOS development 7-8 years ago. UIKit is actually a pretty decent code-only experience, particularly since the addition of anchor-based autolayout constraint building.…

> Storyboards are indeed terrible. XIBs are notably better due to not bogging the editor down with N screens but still not great. Both suck for version control being gigantic blobs of machine generated XML.

I guess these problems stem from their heritage in XIBs being NIBs, i.e. binary “deep frozen” object graphs.

Using XML to make them version-control “friendly” was always a bit of a crutch.

Re: Write code for the web

#266

Post by jwells89 »

steve1977 wrote: post #265
jwells89 wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Storyboards are indeed terrible. XIBs are notably better due to not bogging the editor down with N screens but still not great. Both suck for version control being gigantic blobs of machine generated XML. This is why I abandoned storyboards and XIBs in iOS development 7-8 years ago. UIKit is actually a pretty decent code-only experience, particularly since the addition of anchor-based autolayout constraint building.…

> Storyboards are indeed terrible. XIBs are notably better due to not bogging the editor down with N screens but still not great. Both suck for version control being gigantic blobs of machine generated XML. I guess these problems stem from their heritage in XIBs being NIBs, i.e. binary “deep frozen” object graphs. Using XML to make them version-control “friendly” was always a bit of a crutch.

It also doesn’t help that Xcode will make random little edits to storyboards/XIBs by simply viewing them. It conditions developers to commit minor changes to these files without looking closely which leads to unintentional changes finding their way into production.

Re: Write code for the web

#268

Post by jwells89 »

auggierose wrote: post #258
jwells89 wrote: post #197

The web is great in theory, but the bare-bonesness of the browser environment makes it an exceedingly unappealing platform for apps specifically when you’re used to developing with a throughly batteries-included experience like you get on Apple platforms. Where on macOS a highly capable, polished app can be easily be developed with a list of dependencies and sub-dependencies that can be counted on a single hand (and…

I find that developing with Electron is a much nicer experience than developing for Apple UIs. And I've written my share of iOS/iPad apps starting over 15 years ago. The nice thing about the Web is that there usually is a library/framework that fits your needs (Electron, for example). For Apple, often there is no good library. Also SwiftUI is so buggy. React just works, and is conceptually simpler (folks, two-way dat…

> For Apple, often there is no good library.

Do you have examples? I’ve not often run into this in my projects. These days there’s Swift packages for most things, and in the worst case I’ll have to write a simple wrapper around some C or C++ library.

SwiftUI is still green yes, which is why I’ve stuck to UIKit for anything moderately complex.

Re: Write code for the web

#269

Post by hermitcrab »

I develop native applications for Windows and Mac (using Qt and C++). I get a strong feeling that Microsoft (for all it's flaws) cares a lot more about developers than Apple does. I wonder if some of this is because Gates was a developer and Jobs wasn't.

Re: Write code for the web

#270

Post by mnvrth »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #185
mnvrth wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for saying that! Such feedback is very encouraging, much appreciated :)

I think some of the processes you include nudge your presentation in a positive direction. ex's: Google is an example where I never grieved much because I understood the dynamics ... With Apple I didn’t understand the dynamics. The point where I disgustedly gave up was when I found out that while I was jumping all these kafkaesque hoops, instead you could just go to Apple's own web music player, type MusicKit.getInst…

I believe that there is too much negativity going around, and I try my best to nudge things in a positive direction, and reading your comment I feel happy that it now that is also being reflected in how I write.

Thank you for the comment! Much appreciated :)

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