enabled = connected + empowered
As the end of the first quarter of the year approaches, we find that the lockdowns and travel limitations have impacted on our pace of tech development … positively. It turns out that sitting at home with your laptop is a sure-fire way to increase the amount of time you get to think about coding.
One of the areas we have been giving extra attention to is the breadth of clients we would like to support. Simply having an Android chat app as our main user interface is not enough. We also see value in showcasing our system’s capabilities from different perspectives.
Considering our small development team and our desire to support Android, iOS, Windows, MacOS, Chromebook devices … building a PWA (Progressive Web App) client seems like the logical choice, and having now done so, the prototype is giving us a footprint on any device with a reasonably modern browser. It is also worth mentioning that we are finding the PWA development cycle extremely fast, which means it becomes quick and cheap to prototype new functionality.
We certainly are not preaching that PWAs are the silver bullet. After all, a PWA is just a fancy website and has the associated limitations, but these are generally not related to our key functionality. Perhaps the only shortcoming that impacts us is the inability to read the user’s entire contact list in one sweep. However, even this has workarounds with PWA support for a contact picker. Geospatial functionality is well supported, giving us the ability to incorporate location-aware chats such as lost pet services. Our implementation ensures that all data that resides on the device is strongly encrypted, meaning that no information is at risk if your app storage is accessed, even on shared or public devices.
Out prototype app can be shared as a link, and best of all, does not require a Play Store presence so there are fewer hurdles to overcome. When first used, it appears as a web page in your browser of choice and offers you the option to install it to your home screen where it resides just like a “normal” app. Updates are a doddle… we simply upload the latest version to our server and clients update without any user interaction.
Adding a new client written in JavaScript demonstrates that the platform is open and can easily be accessed by multiple technologies. In fact, our bot technology uses Python scripts to do the same thing. So whatever your choice of client platform, as long as you can perform an HTTP request and set up a WebSocket we are confident you can utilise our platform. We are always happy to discuss and share our toys. If you know somebody with a real-life use case that would benefit from peer or group communication, location-aware messaging or sharing of opinions, put them in touch with us so we can help realise their dream.
Footnote: If you would like to try out the prototype (bug reports welcome), point your browser at this link WORLD News Invitation and tap the “new user” icon (second from left). You should recognise a few familiar names in the conversations that appear.
WORLD – always connected
