Link blog
What PWA Can Do Today ↗
Permalinkwhatpwacando.today, by Dutch developer Danny Moerkerke, is a comprehensive showcase of the capabilities of ‘Progressive Web Apps’ (PWAs). PWAs are websites which you can add to your home screen and which have some of the functionality of native apps. iOS doesn’t support all of the APIs by any stretch, but implements enough of them to make for a decent-enough end product, depending on your app’s use case. (For a detailed list of what is supported and what isn’t, see Maximiliano Firtman’s iOS PWA Compatibility page.)
Features that work on both iOS and Android, and which you can use in your PWA, include push notifications, offline support via Service Workers, biometric authentication (which allows for login with Face ID and Touch ID), web share (where you can use the OS’s native share mechanism), audio recording and geolocation. The Payment Request API allows you to offer payment with Apple Pay or Google Pay. Most of these features can also be employed in websites running within a normal browser session. (An exception is push notifications on iOS, which only work if your website is installed on the home screen.)
Most of my websites function as PWAs, with the exception of working offline, which in past attempts I’ve never got to work well enough. (I could never make fetching updated assets reliable, and didn’t want users to get stuck on an old cached version of the site.) Maybe I’ll give Danny’s Basic Service Worker a shot to try and solve this problem.
(h/t JavaScript Jabber.)
The powerful density of hypertextual writing ↗
PermalinkThe NY Times has had a difficult time covering the 2024 election in a clear, responsible manner. But I wanted to highlight this short opinion piece from the paper’s editorial board[.] […]
What makes this piece so effective is its plain language and its information density. This density is a real strength of hypertext that is often overlooked and taken for granted. Only 110 words in that paragraph but it contains 27 links to other NYT opinion pieces published over the last several months that expand on each linked statement or argument.
I was just re-listening to Jason and John Gruber talk all things web (including why hypertext is great) on a 2023 episode of The Talk Show.
Update, 6 November: John Gruber responds in a post at Daring Fireball.
Chopin waltz unearthed after nearly 200 years ↗
Permalink#/media/File:Chopin_Waltz_in_A_minor_(2024).jpg)
Javier C. Hernández, writing at the New York Times:
Deep in the vault of the Morgan Library & Museum in Manhattan on a late-spring day, the curator Robinson McClellan was sorting through a collection of cultural memorabilia. There were postcards signed by Picasso, a vintage photograph of a French actress and letters from Brahms and Tchaikovsky.
When McClellan came across Item No. 147, he froze[.]
Notes from Poland: “The find has been a sensation in Chopin’s homeland of Poland, where Julita Przybylska-Nowak, vice-rector of the Karol Lipiński Academy of Music in Wrocław, played the waltz for broadcaster TVN.”
Brian Kihoon has created a downloadable score.
Sanding UI ↗
PermalinkOne of the ways I like to do development is to build something, click around a ton, make tweaks, click around more, more tweaks, more clicks, etc., until I finally consider it done.
The word “jazz,” 1 of 6: its true origins ↗
PermalinkIt seems that every person has a favorite story about the origin of the word “jazz”—and an agenda to go with it. […]
1. The word “jazz” is first documented in 1912, and it evolved from a slang word, “jasm,” sometimes spelled “jazzum” or “jassum,” meaning liveliness, “pep,” energy, intensity, and related concepts.
2. All Other Tales about the origin of the word “jazz” are 100% false. […]
CSS @property and the new style ↗
PermalinkAn exploration of the newly supported at-rule for explicitly defining and animating custom properties in CSS.
Start presentations on the second slide ↗
PermalinkTechnical presos need background but background's not engaging. What's a geeky presenter to do?
I've been coaching technical presenters lately, and a couple of concepts come up with almost all of them. I figured I'd write them down so I don't necessarily have to explain them all the time. One is to use specifics and data. I'll write that later. This post explains why to start your presentation on the second slide.
Why aren’t more veterinarians vegan? ↗
PermalinkKaren Asp, writing at Sentient:
Veterinarians work tirelessly to save the lives of animals, the majority working with companion animals. Day in and day out, they spend long hours caring for cats and dogs, other companion animals, too, often going to heroic measures to save them.
They have, after all, taken an oath created by the American Veterinary Medical Association. Part of it states: “Being admitted to the profession of veterinary medicine, I solemnly swear to use my scientific knowledge and skills for the benefit of society through the protection of animal health and welfare, the prevention and relief of animal suffering, the conservation of animal resources, the promotion of public health, and the advancement of medical knowledge.”
Yet for many veterinarians, their food choices do not reflect that oath, even though it does not specify companion animals. While they may not be consuming cats and dogs, they are most likely consuming other species like cows, chickens, and pigs. The irony, of course, is that these animals have the same wants and needs as the patients they treated that day. Call it speciesism, the mistaken belief that some species are more important than others, at its finest.
I recently went vegan after learning of the extent of the cruelty involved in dairy and egg production. Although it’s not known how many vetenarians are vegan, I was surprised to learn that not all are.
Relevant to this topic is the Vegan Report podcast episode ‘The Shocking Reason Why Veterinarians Eat Their Patients’.
How actors remember their lines ↗
PermalinkJohn Seamon, writing at MIT Press Reader:
After a recent theater performance, I remained in the audience as the actors assembled on stage to discuss the current play and the upcoming production that they were rehearsing. Because each actor had many lines to remember, my curiosity led me to ask a question they frequently hear: “How do you learn all of those lines?”
Actors face the demanding task of learning their lines with great precision, but they rarely do so by rote repetition. They did not, they said, sit down with a script and recite their lines until they knew them by heart. Repeating items over and over, called maintenance rehearsal, is not the most effective strategy for remembering. Instead, actors engage in elaborative rehearsal, focusing their attention on the meaning of the material and associating it with information they already know.
The sound of software ↗
PermalinkAndy & Thomas Williams of Not Boring Software:
Repetitive. Disruptive. Annoying.
Sound is an outcast in Software Design. We may embrace the aesthetics of animation and visuals, but sound is different. It’s intrusive. Unlike visuals on a screen, you can’t look away or ignore it. It’s enough to make you rip the batteries out of a toy or frisbee an iPad across the room (speaking from experience).
And yet, play a video game without sound and its powerful punch lands with no force. Without music, once moving moments in a film become dull, even comical (Jurassic Park, Rocky). Sound holds an immense power to elevate any experience—including the most boring of software.
Printing music with CSS Grid ↗
PermalinkStephen Band at Cruncher:
Too often have I witnessed the improvising musician sweaty-handedly attempting to pinch-zoom an A4 pdf on a tiny mobile screen at the climax of a gig. We need fluid and responsive music rendering for the web!
Also interesting: Verovio, ‘a fast, portable and lightweight open-source library for engraving Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) music scores into SVG’; and Designing furniture using the CSS grid by Allan Vidal.