I don’t care how you web dev; I just need more better web apps – Baldur Bjarnason
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In short, online web dev discourse is hell. Partly due to assholes but mostly due to how hard it is to understand each other. Not only do we have different programming needs, we also come from different cultures which can cause a lot of friction given the way we all communicate. At the end of the day, as long as we make good web apps, why worry about how we do it?
There’s a lot of push for single page applications which are hard to get right given how much work browsers do for you for free. A multi page application might work, but it isn’t very sexy. It’s how we end up with teams with dozens of struggling to make a good websites whereas a handful of Apple developers can make memorable apps.
He suggests that the best way we can learn about these is to point to examples. I wonder if putting sites into taxonomies like Jason suggests will help. Some sites can do with multi page setups with turbolink transitions while the rare highly interactive sites can go full SPA.
Good Web Apps
He suggests finding examples of good web apps and talking about them. It’s hard to find good examples, but I know of a few good web apps.
Snapdrop is the one I use most often since Apple thinks it’s too fancy for Bluetooth File Transfer and won’t offer AirDrop outside the Apple ecosystem. Snapdrop just works, making it useful for moving files and messages across a LAN.
Though I haven’t played it in a while, Wordle was a good one too. It is a fun slick game.
Squoosh is another great web app which helps with image conversion. It can show what a codec will look like even without the browser supporting it.
Twitter used to be a very good web app, but now it just shits itself every so often, moreso with it’s new “leadership”. Reddit also had a good one, but they decided to ruin it to funnel people into accounts and mobile apps.
If I find any good examples of SPAs, I’ll be sure to write about them.