samuelgoto/sms-receiver: phone number verification

Your App Should Have Been A Website (And Probably Your Game Too) - Rogue Engine

Remember when every company rushed to make an app? Airlines, restaurants, even your local coffee shop. Back then, it made some sense. Browsers weren’t as powerful, and apps had unique features like notifications and offline access. But fast-forward to today, and browsers can do all that. Yet businesses still push native apps as if it’s 2010, and we’re left downloading apps for things that should just work on the web.

This is all factually correct, but alas as Cory Doctorow points out, you can’t install an ad-blocker in a native app. To you and me, that’s a bug. To short-sighted businesses, it’s a feature.

(When I say “ad-blocker”, I mean “tracking-blocker”.)

The Performance Inequality Gap, 2021 - Infrequently Noted

Developers, particularly in Silicon Valley firms, are definitionally wealthy and enfranchised by world-historical standards. Like upper classes of yore, comfort (“DX”) comes with courtiers happy to declare how important comfort must surely be. It’s bunk, or at least most of it is.

As frontenders, our task is to make services that work well for all, not just the wealthy. If improvements in our tools or our comfort actually deliver improvements in that direction, so much the better. But we must never forget that measurable improvement for users is the yardstick.

the Web at a crossroads - Web Directions

John weighs in on the clashing priorities of browser vendors.

Imagine if the web never got CSS. Never got a way to style content in sophisticated ways. It’s hard to imagine its rise to prominence in the early 2000s. I’d not be alone in arguing a similar lack of access to the sort of features inherent to the mobile experience that WebKit and the folks at Mozilla have expressed concern about would (not might) largely consign the Web to an increasingly marginal role.

The beauty of modern mobile websites · Pushing Pixels

Two observations of websites on mobile devices today:

1. They are beautifully designed, with great typography, clear branding, all optimized for readability.
2. I had to install Firefox, Adblock Plus and uBlock Origin, as well as manually select and remove additional elements such as subscription overlays.

Both observations are the result of conscious design decisions.

Making a ‘post-it game’ PWA with mobile accelerometer API’s | Trys Mudford

I made an offhand remark at the Clearleft Christmas party and Trys ran with it…