The most popular english open one seems to be: https://pixfed.com right now
There is a Join link at https://pixelfed.org/ by the way.
A lot of people don't consider the economics of UI animation.
Smooth animation only makes sense in powerful devices. For the past 10 years we've seen an increase in UI animations which required users to buy newer and more powerful devices to achieve smoother and more complex animations.
Look at any phone/tablet review and you will see the reviewer try to open the app drawer or something similar to showcase performance. "Look how fluid it moves!"
Perfectly fine devices are constantly being replaced and thrown away because they can't keep up with more and more demanding UI animations.
Another aspect is energy consumption, battery production, etc, which I don't think is negligible when considering billions of devices being used for hours every day.
And the sad truth is, very often UI animation is overused.
Ever tried to get users in emerging markets on old Android devices to discover, download and update your native app? It's a world of pain.
PWA's aren't the perfect solution here - on those same old devices, theres a good chance your user is running a 5+ year old browser engine, with a lot of bugs that are hard to even test against, considering how many combinations of screen size, phone, and browser software version there are.
The topics of judgement you mentioned are all entirely subjective, but they run near identically for me.
Does it browse twitter? Yes. Is it good? Well, maybe if all you ever uses are PWAs, this is considered "good."
https://github.com/cdr/code-server
This is amazing. I mean it isn't a stretch considering the main VSCode app is Electron based, but having a hosted development environment like this has always been a dream...
I turn off all the OS-level animations using my phone's accessibility settings. It is a much better usability experience and "feels" far more performant - I perceive less time spent waiting, anyway.
I wish I could do it in apps too, so that I the time it takes to complete an action wasn't bounded by the duration of the "beautiful animation" someone felt it was helpful to include.
There's an about button at the top that will take you to the about/landing page. I was debating on linking to that instead, but it's not a PWA, just a simple static site.
* I don't make a distinction between 'manifest files and offline support' ('PWAs') and other web apps. I suspect most people don't either.
(we're a daily prediction platform with cash prizes - think of us like a hybrid between HQ trivia, a sportsbook, and Jeopardy)
I managed to convince myself that I'm not using twitter website correctly because it happens to me all the time - after digging into some comment/thread I want to return to 'main' thread and it returns to the beginning, after that I often give up and just close tab, this is incredibly frustrating and infuriating!
I'm pretty sure that's somehow my fault because it would be insane that one of most frequently used service in the world and company which employs most skilled 10x workforce is unwilling or incapable to deal with problem like this.
They have absolutely no incentive in making your usage of Twitter more efficient as it would 1) decrease the "engagement" metrics and 2) give you less opportunities to look at ads if you just see the content you want directly.
Social networks need to strike a fine balance between extracting the maximum value out of the user (profit) while giving them the least possible value (expense). They believe the current system achieves this balance, which I sadly have to agree with because the average user's bullshit tolerance is orders of magnitude higher than ours and they will put up with a lot of shit without leaving the platform.
> which employs most skilled 10x workforce
There are still scammers replying to high-profile accounts with obvious spam such as fake cryptocurrency giveaways, something which can be filtered out with simple regular expressions. I would like to add a very big "[citation needed]" to Twitter having significant skill in house, whether it's engineering or management. Whatever skill they had when they initially built & scaled the platform seems to be long gone.
Just gonna leave us hangin'?
User abuse is rampant on the Web. For example, those APIs you mention are used to fingerprint machines. If you're genuinely concerned with abuse of privacy, you'd do yourself a huge favor by researching the history and current mechanisms for such abuse by websites and, by extension, PWAs.
Both on desktop and mobile I use an array of browser extensions to limit online tracking and fingerprinting. On Android I use Webapps Sandboxed Browser [1] to log in to webapps without leaking the logged in status to other websites.
I feel that with the web I get a fighting chance, while native apps are designed for tracking you.
That's relative to the size of the thing you're installing, no? Wouldn't it then be comparable to software of the same size being installed on the host system?
>no/much less space taken on local storage.
Isn't this, too, relative to the size of the application or the data it is persisting?
Native, cross-platform frameworks exist.
>no app store approvals/revenue share required[...]
Software was distributed long before those walled gardens came into existence. It is as possible as ever to install native software on your machine without having to go through a "store."
>openable via a link[...]
I don't follow. Do you mean a hyperlink from within a browser? I suppose, if one really wanted, it wouldn't take much effort to create such a thing for launching their native applications, but why would that be an advantage: "links" to open applications have existed as icons and various other actions for as long as graphical UIs have been in existence.
>works to the webs' strengths
What does this mean? What advantages do PWAs have, garnered from the Web, that native applications are unable to tap in to?
What’s the likelihood that people are going to put their credit card information into some unknown website compared to using Apple/Google for payments?
Every “advantage” you mentioned is better for the developer not the user. That’s why PWA’s will never take off.
Outside of HN's bubble, people do that all the time. Or at worst they will use PayPal or an equivalent to make payments.
If people were so willing to make payments on random websites, merchants wouldn’t be falling all over themselves to use Amazon’s marketplace and sell their self published books through Kindle.
Not to mention that micropayments on the web has been the holy grail that no one has found in over two decades.
Apple was the first to make $0.99 payments over the internet feasible with iTunes back in 2005. There is much more friction to buying something on the web than just clicking on buy from Amazon/Apple/Google.
People fall all over themselves to use Amazon's marketplace because
- it has a lower barrier to entry to setting up and managing a store themselves - it has a built-in audience they can access without trying to hustle their proprietary domain name into the public consciousness (SEO is hard)
What on earth gives you the idea that it has anything to do with people's willingness or lack thereof to make payments on random websites?
> There is much more friction to buying something on the web than just clicking on buy from Amazon/Apple/Google.
Again, low-friction payment platforms that aren't "use Apple/Google's in-app payment SDKs" are readily available in 2020. PayPal is one such, Flutterwave is another (in sub-Saharan Africa), etc. In fact, I use those far more in a month than I've ever used Apple or Google Pay.
So the same advantages that using the App Store had over going to random websites and installing J2Me apps back in the day....
Again, low-friction payment platforms that aren't "use Apple/Google's in-app payment SDKs" are readily available in 2020. PayPal is one such, Flutterwave is another (in sub-Saharan Africa), etc. In fact, I use those far more in a month than I've ever used Apple or Google Pay.
You realize Apple has had more users payment information on file than any other company since the iTunes heyday than maybe Amazon?
Stripe integrates with Google Pay, so not as janky as you might imagine...
- Crossplatform (in use and development)
- No store/developer fees to pay
- CSS and HTML are capable of things native can only dream of like real reusable responsive UIs across many types of devices.
https://medium.com/missive-app/our-dirty-little-secret-cross...
- Until SwiftUI web front end was way more advanced in terms of reactive programming of UIs
Software was distributed long before those walled gardens popped up. Native applications need no store.
>- Crossplatform (in use and development)
Cross-platform frameworks exist for native applications.
>- No store/developer fees to pay
Same goes for native applications
>- CSS and HTML are capable of things native can only dream of like real reusable responsive UIs across many types of devices.
>https://medium.com/missive-app/our-dirty-little-secret-cross....
This is just an incredibly odd statement. First of all, if such layouts are rendering on your machine then of course native applications are also capable of such a feat. Web browsers capabilities are limited to the resources being made available on the host machine. The same goes for any software running on the machine.
And second: Qt.
>- Until SwiftUI web front end was way more advanced in terms of reactive programming of UIs
I don't understand what you mean here.
On iOS they do. On Android 99% of users won't use a different store.
> Cross-platform frameworks exist for native applications.
Nothing really good though. Best ones are RN and Flutter which do not get you there 100%.
A PWA will consume less memory and will be smaller than a RN or Flutter app.
> Same goes for native applications
Not on iOS.
> if such layouts are rendering on your machine then of course native applications are also capable of such a feat
Theoretically, yes.
> And second: Qt.
Remind me again how much a QT license costs?
> I don't understand what you mean here.
For the last 10 or so years UI development for the web has gone from archaic jQuery imperative DOM manipulation to a new paradigm with data binding and reactive data.
UI data binding in the native world exists but is extremely complicated and tedious. AFAIK the only thing that is similar to what we have now in web dev is SwiftUI.
I mean, PWAs by definition run inside a VM that has to provide a very heavy runtime, don't they?
This isn't a (comparatively) minimal like the JVM -- this is usually a Chromium instance, with the full V8 engine, Canvas and DOM support, and sandboxing.
It's not reasonable to say that something with this much baggage should be able to run as quickly as a native application, which can often afford to have a much more minimal sandbox, no bytecode layer, a smaller memory footprint, and more deliberate and performant integration with underlying system APIs.
That average includes the developed world. The average Android phone is even worse in the developing world.
But yes there are classes of applications for which underlying implementation technology does not matter much while browser based access from anywhere is more important.