Might be helpful to add an example. This is google before/after type thing.
Just to make sure I understand you (explicit always better than implicit =]), an example of what? An example PWA?
Show HN: Pep – Turn Your Website into a Progressive Web App
31–40 of 56 posts
Re: Show HN: Pep – Turn Your Website into a Progressive Web App
#32Can someone explain what a PWA is? I tried reading the official Mozilla docs and wikipedia. I don't understand - how do these apps work like "native" apps if they are not using native UI kits and running inside a browser? That's not really "native". Native app to me is like macOS Mail or Sublime Text. I don't consider any of the electron apps (Slack, VSCode) as "native". There is a real beauty of using native apps. I…
PWAs can be turned into native apps as well, that is the part you missed while trying to understand them.
PWAs have two ways of deploying, either via the standard Web, where they get to use only Web APIs and via the manifest and service workers, get promoted to have some OS light integration with removal of the browser frame.
However, you missed the second way of deploying them, if you package the application URL alongside a signed package on app stores (Android/Windows/ChromeOS), then the PWA gets upgraded and has access to the native APIs just like any other native app.
Here is how it is done for UWP with the old Edge, the new one will eventually catch up.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/progressive-...
Similar approach on Android,
https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2019/02/using-twa
If you want C++, then PWAs can also enjoy WebAssembly + WebGL (and eventually WebGPU).
https://www.qt.io/qt-examples-for-webassembly
Or just package them into the store format from above and call the native versions of GL/DirectX directly.
Re: Show HN: Pep – Turn Your Website into a Progressive Web App
#33Get back to me when there's something to actually see.
Call my cynical but having made a few progressive webapps myself I'm very dubious that a "single line of code" is going to result in a great, performant PWA. How is the service worker installed? Or the manifest.json? How do you decide the user behavior that triggers a page precache? How does that precache deal with things like user logins when it has no visibility into your system? Where do the app icons come from? And so on. pep.dev's own service worker is just a Workbox cache and little more.
I'll openly admit I'm a cynic. Prove me wrong!
Re: Show HN: Pep – Turn Your Website into a Progressive Web App
#34Hi guys! I don't want to build native apps. So I built Pep. It turns your website into a Progressive Web App (PWA) with one line of code. It's kind of like Workbox ( https://developers.google.com/web/tools/workbox ), but with adaptive pre-fetching, CDN, and responsive asset batteries included. I'd love your input; feedback is how good products become great.
Pretty awesome idea. I could see trying this out on some older projects that would be a pain to upgrade to a PWA.
Re: Show HN: Pep – Turn Your Website into a Progressive Web App
#35What's an example of a great PWA?
Re: Show HN: Pep – Turn Your Website into a Progressive Web App
#36"Your static JavaScript, CSS, and images are automatically minified, optimized, and hosted globally on Google's Cloud" That's a non-starter for me. Google screwed me hard years ago when I was using their Adwords. I can't forgive or forget that.
Huh. How did Google screw you? Pep's not married to Google's CDN. Which other CDN(s) do you, or would you prefer to, use over Google's? Thank you for weighing in.
Not op but Google has been known to ban accounts, even well established ones, for either stupid reasons(like an expired payment method) or unknown reasons, and there's very little you can do about it - other then make a HN post and hope some Google engineers can talk to the right people.
Re: Show HN: Pep – Turn Your Website into a Progressive Web App
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
> macOS Mail... made with web technology Do you have a source for this? Mail content may very well be rendered in a web view (which is unsurprising given rich text and HTML are underpinnings of email), but I’d be surprised if the UI and widgets aren’t native.
If the app is any good you should not notice what stack it was built with. It was a hypothetical question, I actually have no idea.
I think Cocoa is pretty noticeable.
Re: Show HN: Pep – Turn Your Website into a Progressive Web App
#38Might be helpful to add an example. This is google before/after type thing.
Just to make sure I understand you (explicit always better than implicit =]), an example of what? An example PWA?
An example project using Pep. Most people are going to be skeptical that this can be done with a single line of code.
Re: Show HN: Pep – Turn Your Website into a Progressive Web App
#39I fear that "do you want to add to desktop" will end up just like "do you want notifications". Please Chromium and Firefox team, for the love of web apps, stop the modal spam! Its very useful features, but you are teaching users to ignore them.
Re: Show HN: Pep – Turn Your Website into a Progressive Web App
#40Kudos for making it so easy. If PWA is the way forward, then services like this will help accelerate adoption. Will be good to see how this affects / slows down site performance. On a separate note, how many users know about or bother to “Add to screen”? Can the number of users launching from the home screen be tracked?
> Kudos for making it so easy. If PWA is the way forward, then services
> like this will help accelerate adoption.
Thank you!
> On a separate note, how many users know about or bother to “Add to > screen”?
PWAs are relatively new. Not many users know about installing them yet. But that's changing. See the install flow videos here
http://i.imgur.com/vVoDtbW.png
> Can the number of users launching from the home screen be tracked?
Definitely.
In the PWA's manifest, you can specify the `start_url`. This can include a sentinel to differentiate a PWA launch vs a browser session, eg
"start_url": "/?launch=pwa"