Adactio: Links—Tagged with app

Native Apps Should Be Avoided Whenever Possible — No One’s Happy

The browser is the security boundary. Websites operate within it. Native apps bypass it.

But there’s still one thing that native apps do better than the web. If you want to be able to monitor and track users to an invasive degree, the web can’t compete with the capabilities of native apps. That’s why you’ll see so many websites on your mobile device that implore to install their app from the app store.

This piece goes into the details:

Most native apps collect far more data than their website equivalents ever could. They request permissions to hardware, sensors, and background processes that browsers deliberately restrict. The third-party software embedded in these apps frequently transmits your location, device identifiers, and behavioral data to third parties before you even see a consent prompt.

Bruce Lawson’s personal site : Apple at 50: my top five Apple moments

Never forget:

The time Apple lied to the UK regulator

The time when Apple told the EU that Safari is 3 different browsers

When Apple tried to shut the UK investigation down

When Apple’s VP of Finance got caught lying under oath

When Apple tried to wreck all EU Web Apps

[css-forms-1] Include fieldset and legend · Issue #11983 · w3c/csswg-drafts

My wish is coming true!

Madra Teanga - Open Source Irish Language Programming

An open source project that has already produced a great app for learning Irish—programmed in a language called Draíocht (sin “magic” as Béarla)!

I’m supporting this on Open Collective.

Layoutit Terra - CSS Terrain Generator

It’s wild what you can do with CSS these days!

Atlas of Space

A nifty interactive 3D map of our solar system

Optimizing PWAs For Different Display Modes — Smashing Magazine

There’s really good browser support for display-mode media queries and this article does a really good job of running through some of the use cases for your progressive web app.

Vibe code is legacy code | Val Town Blog

When you vibe code, you are incurring tech debt as fast as the LLM can spit it out. Which is why vibe coding is perfect for prototypes and throwaway projects: It’s only legacy code if you have to maintain it!

The worst possible situation is to have a non-programmer vibe code a large project that they intend to maintain. This would be the equivalent of giving a credit card to a child without first explaining the concept of debt.

If you don’t understand the code, your only recourse is to ask AI to fix it for you, which is like paying off credit card debt with another credit card.

It’s time for modern CSS to kill the SPA - Jono Alderson

SPAs were a clever solution to a temporary limitation. But that limitation no longer exists.

Use modern server rendering. Use actual pages. Animate with CSS. Preload with intent. Ship less JavaScript.

Welcome to Medieval Murder Maps

CSI London, York, and Oxford:

Discover the murders, sudden deaths, sanctuary churches, and prisons of three thriving medieval cities.

Vibe coding and Robocop

The short version of what I want to say is: vibe coding seems to live very squarely in the land of prototypes and toys. Promoting software that’s been built entirely using this method would be akin to sending a hacked weekend prototype to production and expecting it to be stable.

Remy is taking a very sensible approach here:

I’ve used it myself to solve really bespoke problems where the user count is one.

Would I put this out to production: absolutely not.

Frame of preference – Aresluna

Marcin has outdone himself this time. Not only has he created an exhaustive history of the settings controls in Apple interfaces, he’s gone and made them all interactive!

While it’s easy to be blown away by the detail of the interactive elements here, it’s also worth taking a moment to appreciate just how good the writing is too.

Bravo!

Baseline Newly Available: Stay on Top of New Web Features - The New Stack

Grrr…

Chrome, Edge and Firefox updates usually reach 95% of users within three months. But Safari updates are tied to a new release of the underlying operating system, so they take around 19 months to reach the same usage, and some updates may even need a new device.

This is so shameful. And glad as I am to see new features landing in Safari, as long as they hobble updates like this it’s all just pissing in the wind.

The orders of complexity of websites and what they imply for the design of web platform features

An excellent appraisal of the importance of the rule of least power.

Scrappy: make little apps for you and your friends

I really like the thinking behind this project:

We believe computers should work for people, and dream of a future where computing, like cooking or word processing, is available to everyone. Where you can solve your own small, unique problems with small, unique apps. Where you don’t just rely on mass-market apps made by expert programmers. Where you share home-made little apps with family and friends.

Scrappy is our contribution to this dream.

Who’s Afraid of a Hard Page Load?

Why single-page apps are just not worth it:

Here’s the problem: your team almost certainly doesn’t have what it takes to out-engineer the browser. The browser will continuously improve the experience of plain HTML, at no cost to you, using a rendering engine that is orders of magnitude more efficient than JavaScript.

Meanwhile, the browser marches on, improving the UX of every website that uses basic HTML semantics. For instance: browsers often don’t repaint full pages anymore.

The web is open, apps are closed. The majority of web users have installed an ad blocker (which is also a privacy blocker). But no one installs an ad blocker for an app, because it’s a felony to distribute that tool, because you have to reverse-engineer the app to make it. An app is just a website wrapped in enough IP so that the company that made it can send you to prison if you dare to modify it so that it serves your interests rather than theirs.

The web on mobile (a response) | Clagnut by Richard Rutter

Rich suggests another reason why the UX of websites on mobile is so shit these days:

The path to installing a native app is well trodden. We search the App Store (or ironically follow a link from a website), hit ‘Get’ and the app is downloaded to our phone’s home screen, ready to use any time with a simple tap.

A PWA can also live on your home screen, nicely indistinguishable from a native app. But the journey to getting a PWA – or indeed any web app – onto your home screen remains convoluted to say the least. This is the lack of equivalence I’m driving at. I wonder if the mobile web experience would suck as badly if web apps could be installed just as easily as native apps?

Link tags: app

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