2021-04-05
Novel tools people are using to build websites
Hacker News thread: What novel tools are you using to create web sites/apps. My notes from this thread:
- Tabulator is a JavaScript tables library that can do some very fancy tables indeed
- The Running in Production podcast includes interviews with a bunch of people about how they build their stuff. Reminds me of my short-lived (6 episode) How Apps Are Build podcast.
- Lots of love for Svelte and Tailwind.
- A few people praising the old-is-new Hotwire approach.
- I don’t 100% get Koji yet. It looks like they allow you to make interactive, customized landing pages for social media. “Interactive” as in allows you to sell things, collect email addresses, do giveaways. That part looks possibly interesting on its own, but they also allow developers to create widgets for Koji using the features provided by their platform.
- Backendless is a “visual app development platform”. It appears to be a competitor for Firebase, offering auth, real-time apps, push notification, and more. They even allow you to run your own backend, though the pricing for that is not listed.
Wonder looks like an interesting video platform
Wonder allows someone to host online video gatherings of up to 1500 people, broadcasting to the whole group or just to smaller subsets of people who can organize into smaller groups.
The Lost Apps of the 80s
Dave Winer shared a conversation he had with Ray Ozzie about 80s apps lamenting the loss of apps and writing tools. Maybe at some point, I’ll have time to write a counterpoint to this, because I was around in the 80s also and think we have a lot of choice today. (Powerful writing tools? I’m typing this in Obsidian right now and have a little bit of programming that converts it for Hugo to publish to Netlify.)
pterm: pretty Go terminal apps
Speaking of 80s user interfaces, pterm is a Go library for creating nice-looking terminal apps.