Disclaimer, just in case… ? I work for Google on the Chrome Developer Relations team. But for this post, I want to make it super duper clear that I'm speaking not on behalf of my employer and that all views and opinions expressed in this blog post are purely my own: Thomas Steiner's, the guy commonly known for his avatar with a green hat, but today in my pajamas having my second morning coffee. Oh, thanks for asking, the two cats are Lluna (yes, with double 'l', it means moon in Catalan) Norris, looking at the camera, and Skinny Norris, looking out of the window. How I noticed ? With this out ..read more

The Lenovo ThinkVision P27h-20 screen I get from work is a decent 27 inch screen. Coming from the Retina screen of my laptop that I worked on for a long time, I was initially (and still am) not impressed by the resolution of 2560×1440. It took some time to get used to the low resolution on such a big screen, but it gets the job done… My biggest gripe with the screen was that it just randomly turned off when connected to my MacBook Pro in clamshell mode. I finally found the culprit after combing through the Console system logs for any trace for the longest time. I found out that the MacBook Pro ..read more

Background ? The WebAssembly meetup in Munich has a history that reaches back to 2018. After a long Covid-related hiatus and a lack of organizers to pick up the ball again, A Wasm New Year! was the first event under the new organizing team. Google always had a strong presence at the events, so to continue the tradition I happily agreed to offer a talk at the first post-Covid meetup. Talks ? Compiling to and Optimizing Wasm with Binaryen ? Speaker: Thomas Steiner In the first half of the talk, I showed at the example of a toy programming language that I called ExampleScript how to write a comp ..read more

Background ? The 2023 edition of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Technical Plenary and Advisory Committee (TPAC) meeting took place from September 11 to 15 in the Meliã hotel in Seville, Spain. The hotel is located right next to the Plaza de España, a major Spanish tourist destination. The setup of the meeting was hybrid, and on site, strict Covid precautions were enforced, even though the pandemic was declared to be "over". Despite these methods, several people caught it. This is my personal report as a representative of the Chrome DevRel team at Google. Monday, Tuesday ? Web Applicatio ..read more

Executive summary ? With macOS Sonoma, Apple goes all-in on the concept of installable web apps. They're highly integrated in the overall macOS experience and don't give away their web roots by not showing any Safari UI at all. Testing environment ? Tested on macOS Sonoma 14.0 Beta (23A5257q) with Safari version 17.0 (19616.1.14.11.11). It probably doesn't matter, but the testing device was a 13-inch, M1, 2020 MacBook Pro. Install experience ? On macOS Sonoma, you can add a website—any website, not just apps with a manifest—to your Dock. Go to the Share icon and click Add to Dock, or use the m ..read more

Cross Platform Software Frameworks ? The other day, I came across Elk Native, a native version of the rather excellent, if early-stage, Mastodon Web client Elk. To be honest, I wondered why they would build a native version, if the Web client works so well. I downloaded the 7.8 MB Elk_0.4.0_macos_x86_64.dmg and immediately ran into Issue #74, that is, a blank screen. To better understand the motivation behind the Elk Native developers, I tried the same for one of my apps, with different frameworks. This repository contains the same PWA, SVGcode, wrapped five times with different cross pla ..read more

I'm a big fan of the macOS Continuity Camera feature, which lets me use the camera system of my iPhone (11 Pro Max) as a webcam in macOS, since the built-in FaceTime HD camera on my MacBook Pro (13-inch, M1, 2020) is, well, not the greatest. It used to work just fine everywhere in the past, but at some point it stopped working in Chrome. It would still find the camera in native apps like PhotoBooth, FaceTime, etc., but not in the browser. As I'm also a Ventura beta tester and always on the latest betas, I blamed a bug there. Turns out, this is a new-ish privacy feature and working as intended ..read more

If you want to build an app, you have several ways of doing it. You can build a platform-specific app for the platforms you care about, for example, Windows, Android, and iOS. In which case you would build three apps. You can also build a (progressive) Web app, possibly in addition to platform-specific apps. Alternatively, you can choose a cross-platform framework such as Electron.js or Ionic that promises to let you write once and run anywhere. Let me begin by walking you through three extraordinary examples of apps whose makers chose to also build for the Web, apart from building platform-sp ..read more

I had the honor of being interviewed on the JS Party podcast and chat about Project Fugu ?. Thanks to the hosts, Amal Hussein and Nick Nisi, for the interesting questions. Here's the episode for your listening pleasure. This post appeared first on https://blog.tomayac.com/2022/12/05/project-fugu-on-the-js-party-podcast ..read more

I let the community speak on this event. I have collected all the blog posts about Modern Frontends Live that I could find. If you wrote another, please send a pull request or let me know directly, and I will happily link to it. My experience of Modern Frontends Conference - DEV Community ?‍??‍? by Jo Franchetti Modern Frontends by Cassie Evans My experience at Modern Frontends Live | hidde.blog by Hidde de Vries Modern Frontends Live by Mike Hartington Modern Frontends by Todd Libby Modern Frontends (workshop & conference): An Attendees Perspective by Chris Perry My Experience at Modern ..read more