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A pretty sweet push notification solution for mobile Safari
An entire generation of apps-that-should-have-been web pages has sprung up, often shoehorned into supposedly cross-platform frameworks that create a subpar user experience sludge. Nowhere is this more true than for media — how many apps from newspapers or magazines have you installed, solely for a very specific purpose like receiving breaking news alerts? How many of those apps are just wrappers around web views? How many of those apps should have been web pages?
Web Push on iOS requires installing the web app - Webventures
Instead of doing what the competing browsers are doing (and learning from years of experience of handling Web Push), Apple decided to reinvent a wheel here. What they’ve turned up with looks a lot more like a square.
How We Verified Ourselves on Mastodon — and How You Can Too – The Markup
It gives me warm fuzzies to see an indie web building block like rel="me" getting coverage like this.
Empty Pointers and Constellations of AI
AI becomes a stand-in term for whatever technologies and techniques are new, shiny, and just beyond the grasp of our understanding. We use it to gesture at a future we cannot fully comprehend or currently realise. As soon as we do, it will no longer be “AI.”
Life Universe
A fractal version of Conway’s Game Of Life: keep zooming out …forever!
Syndicating Posts from Your Personal Website to Twitter and Mastodon · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer
A very timely post on using If This Then That to automatically post notes from your own site (via RSS) to Twitter and Mastodon.
I’ve set this up for my Mastodon profile.
Little Rules About Big Things · Collab Fund
Pessimism always sounds smarter than optimism because optimism sounds like a sales pitch while pessimism sounds like someone trying to help you.
I usually hate these kinds of lists of bumper-sticker aphorisms but some of these have me pondering my own work, like this one:
People learn when they’re surprised. Not when they read the right answer, or are told they’re doing it wrong, but when they experience a gap between expectations and reality.
Or this:
There are two types of information: stuff you’ll still care about in the future, and stuff that matters less and less over time. Long-term vs. expiring knowledge.
Fermented Code: Modelling the Microbial Through Miso - Serpentine Galleries
Y’know, I started reading this great piece by Claire L. Evans thinking about its connections to systems thinking, but I ended up thinking more about prototyping. And microbes.
Spotify – dConstruct 2022
If you were at dConstruct on Friday and you enjoyed the mood music during the breaks, this is what you were listening to.
Winnie Lim » on leading a purposeless life
💯
I think it is beautiful if people have a purpose. But it should be valid to lead a purposeless life too. … Maybe it is okay to not pursue potential and just be okay with being.
It’s Time to Build a Progressive Web App. Here’s How – The New Stack
Much as I appreciate the optimism of this evaluation, I don’t hold out much hope that people’s expectations are going to change any time soon:
Indeed, when given a choice, users will opt for the [native] app version of a platform because it’s been considered the gold standard for reliability. With progressive web apps (PWAs), that assumption is about to change.
Nonetheless, this is a level-headed look at what a progressive web app is, mercifully free of hand-waving:
- App is served through HTTPS.
- App has a web app manifest with at least one icon. (We’ll talk more about the manifest shortly.)
- App has a registered service worker with a fetch event handler. (More on this later too.)
An Archeology for the Future in Space
I really enjoyed this deep dive into some design fiction work done by Fabien Girardin, Simone Rebaudengo, and Fred Scharmen.
(Remember when Simone spoke at dConstruct about toasters? That was great!)
The Resiliency in the Web’s Layers - Jim Nielsen’s Blog
Jim mashes up Ilya Grigorik’s book High Performance Browser Networking with my talk on the layers of the web and Nassim Taleb’s idea of antifragility.
The Biggest Thing from WWDC 2022 - Webventures
Web Push on iOS will change the “we need to build a native app” decision.
Push notifications are definitely not the sole reason to go native, but in my experience, it’s one of the first things clients ask for. They may very well be the thing that pushes your client over the edge and forces them, you and the entire project to accept the logic of the app store model.
News from WWDC22: WebKit Features in Safari 16 Beta | WebKit
Good news and bad news…
The good news is that web notifications are coming to iOS—my number one wish!
The bad news is that it won’t happen until next year sometime.
Letter in Support of Responsible Fintech Policy
A well-written evisceration of cryptobollocks signed by Bruce Scheier, Tim Bray, Molly White, Cory Doctorow, and more.
If you’re a concerned US computer scientist, technologist or developer, you’ve got till June 10th to add your signature before this is submitted to congress.
What serif typeface would go well with Proxima Nova?
Mark Simonson goes into the details of his lovely new typeface Proxima Sera.
The Technium: 103 Bits of Advice I Wish I Had Known
I’m not usually that keen on lists of pithy aphorisms but some of these really resonated…
- If you stop to listen to a musician or street performer for more than a minute, you owe them a dollar.
- Efficiency is highly overrated; Goofing off is highly underrated. Regularly scheduled sabbaths, sabbaticals, vacations, breaks, aimless walks and time off are essential for top performance of any kind. The best work ethic requires a good rest ethic.
- The biggest lie we tell ourselves is “I dont need to write this down because I will remember it.”
- Buy used books. They have the same words as the new ones. Also libraries.
- You can be whatever you want, so be the person who ends meetings early.
- It’s thrilling to be extremely polite to rude strangers.
UA gotta be kidding
Brian recounts the sordid messy history of user-agent strings.
I remember somebody once describing a user-agent string as “a reverse-chronological history of web browsers.”