A small WebView wrapper for Tildes
I know a lot of people have been asking for an app, if just for a home screen/app drawer icon, so I cobbled together a small WebView wrapper that installs on your phone as an app.
It's for Android only (sorry iOS users) and probably will receive very little support, since I'm not an Android developer! In fact, this is just a fork of the vastly more capable woheller69's gptAssist, ported over to support Tildes and with some limiting functionality removed. Absolutely check out some of their stuff! My app and the original gptAssist are both licensed under the GPLv3. If anyone would like to contribute, please do! In fact, if you're an Android dev, feel free to fork and make it much better.
I absolutely appreciate the design philosophy of the Tildes devs and think that a WebView wrapper is a good compromise between having an app and using the thoughtfully-built website. If you're anything like me, you just like being able to tap on an icon to get to where you're going. I put this together with that in mind.
I feel like a moron, but I have no idea how to download this thing. I always feel like a moron on GitHub.
No problem! Check out the releases page, then click/tap on
app-release.apkunder Assets.You may need to enable Install from unknown sources in your phone's options, if you haven't already.
Probably worth adding that to your README? It's something that's obvious to most developers but not obvious at all to others.
Good call. I'll get that put in there now. Thanks for the suggestion!
Thanks for this.
Why would someone prefer to use a WebView wrapper over a Firefox "Add to Home screen" icon. What are the pros and cons?
Some of us prefer an empty home screen ;) Other than that, there really aren't many differences. However, I do think that a WebView container loads slightly faster than pulling up the website in a browser, though with Tildes' low weight and minimal JS, that could be incorrect.
All in all, this was a personal project to make things slightly more convenient for me. I have no expectation that this will be a quality or even useful app for anyone. Hope you enjoy, though :)
I personally prefer to keep my home screen as clean as possible and will load my apps from the app drawer or a search. AFAIK, Firefox doesn't let you add PWAs as apps in the application drawer.
I'm the opposite. My home screen includes every app I actually open on a single page, with a total of 10 folders to fit everything.
I'm not sure for sure how the wrapper works but I know one frustration with the Add to Home Screen icon is that if I'm in a specific thread, minimize firefox, and then click the link on the home screen, it opens a new tab with the front page of tildes rather than re-opening the existing tab bc it's not the same web address. That's probably my biggest frustration with using my mobile browser since this site is designed so well for it.
Hey, thanks for these, I really appreciate it.
I'm using it now. This is great! Thank you!
Glad you're getting some use out of it! 😄