16
votes
An easy way to browse tildes on mobile
Using Hermit - Lite Apps Browser you can make a shortcut to a dedicated browser session (with cookies and such, so you can stay logged in like an app) for tildes! I find that it works pretty well for a mobile app "substitute" and also it lets me keep tildes separate from all the tags I have open in my main web browser. Figured I'd share my solution for tildes mobile for the curious :)
Through some accidental arcane technowizardry (seriously, I was just trying to make it a bookmark and made a shortcut instead, /shrug) , I was able to do the same with Firefox. Looks great, just wish it had some of the functionality found in apps more available (swiping and the like mostly, I'm a simple man.)
Correct me if I'm wrong, I think this is because Tildes includes a manifest.json in a
<link rel="manifest">element so Firefox thinks it's a webapp (even though a service worker is not registered) and lets you install it on your phone. It should appear as a house(?) icon with plus inside it in the address bar and when you tap it it offers you to install the webapp.I... thought that button was to make the current page the homepage.
I thought it was weird there'd be a dedicated toolbar button for that.
I thought it was even weirder that it only appeared sometimes.
I am not a clever man.
Edit: It actually doesn't seem to create a webapp, just a shortcut. (Simply opens a new tab.)
On firefox 58 mobile it creates a webapp, although it does look just like a shortcut it doesn't display the top browsing bar so it's like in full screen browsing mode.
I'm using an Android phone with a Chrome browser. Chrome has an option to add a shortcut to your phone's home page. So I have a shortcut on my home page that brings me straight to Tildes.net. Easy. Whenever I come here on my phone, I'm always logged in because my browser remembers my login details.
I'm always puzzled why people need to over-engineer these things so much. Why do you need to install an app to browse a website when you've already got an internet browser to do that?
Because the goals of the site don't align with those of the users. With an app you can harvest people's location, call history, contacts list, etc. You can't do those things with a website, so you convince the users they need to use your app instead. They've been very successful at this. Now, most people seem to think in terms of apps, not sites. People say "do you have facebook on your phone", and I'm like, "well yeah, I've got the entire internet on here."
I'm picturing it like if we lived in a world where everyone had a self-driving car with no windows on it. Everyone just gets in, and presses the "go to the store" button. They wait a few minutes and they're at the store. Now, the reality of the situation is the car manufacturer has a deal with a certain store where everything is overpriced and they get a cut of every sale. But at this point you don't even think about how you got to the store, or if this is the best store to get things. You just appreciate the convenience of pressing a single button to get to the store.
If you try and tell these people about the existence of navigation, that they can use a car with windows in it to manually navigate to any store you want, people would say that's waay too complicated, no one wants to deal with that sort of hassle. Any efforts to tell them they're being spied on or ripped off in exchange for this "convenience" fall on deaf ears.
And this is why we can't have nice things.
You answered the question about why app developers want us to use their apps, but that wasn't what I was asking. Why do users themselves want an app that will "harvest people's location, call history, contacts list, etc" when there's already a perfectly good alternative for browsing websites? That's what I've never understood.
It's too complicated. You have to type things, it's very technical. Apps are the way you're told you're supposed to view things on your phone. If people are even aware the apps they're using are reskinned websites, they'd prefer not to use the browser. Browsers are for geeks and technical people. You can get viruses that way. Trust the app store, everything else is a wild west, the app store would never harm you. Enjoy the simplicity of your favorite social media site and all the benefits of push notifications. Stay away from the very technical, hard to use, dangerous internet, it doesn't work well on phones, only apps work on phones. Etc, etc, etc, ad nauseum.
If manual driving cars were only available for a decade before windowless self-driving cars became available, before the majority of people knew how to drive, and the car industry made a concerted effort to tell people only ever to use the self driving feature, that's what normal people do, never drive for yourself, only strange basement-dwelling people do that, it's very dangerous, just let us take you to the stores we bring you to, I could honestly see people saying "I don't care if it shows me ads, spies on me, etc, it's worth it for the convenience."
So... people have been trained to be lazy, basically. "I don't want to work, so you can have my personal contact data if you'll make life easier."
Yeah... nah.
I dunno, I wouldn't blame people directly. To be fair, the marketing divisions of these companies employ psychologists who figure out exactly the best way to manipulate people into doing what they want you to. TV commercials saying "I'm a PC" or "What's a computer" encourage people to remain ignorant. They spread fear, uncertainty and doubt about open platforms, encourage people to use their walled garden. Antivirus companies are constantly telling you evil hackers are trying to steal your info at all times. Websites pop up telling you to install the app because they can't guarantee functionality on such an open platform as the web.
People are told installing apps is the normal, safe way of doing things. To anyone who owned a computer since the 80's this is absurd. Installing programs outside the app store is easy. Browsing the open web is easy. Manually sorting your files and backing them up by hand is annoying, but easy.
People buying a smartphone without ever experiencing the wild west of the actual real internet over dialup using netscape, have been told it's a steep learning curve to use a computer, and it's not worth the effort. Just use this walled garden instead. Click this "I agree" button, it's safe. The app store is safe. The outside world is not.
Most people don't fully consider what is being done with this data or how it could harm them. It's all abstract theories and hypotheticals. All they know is if they press this button they get the funny cat pics, and they've never bothered to consider there's any other way to access those cat pics, or what they're giving up for the convenience of having those cat pics as an icon on their home screen.
The only complaint I've heard is that if you tap the shortcut again, it will open a new tab. The solution of course is to just open the regular chrome shortcut when you already have Tildes open, but I guess that's not "mobile-friendly" enough
To me, that's desired behaviour. If I already have a tab open with something else, I don't want Tildes to overwrite that tab; I want a new tab with Tildes. But, as they say, other people's mileage may vary.
It shouldn't do that any more - if you add a shortcut now, it should act almost exactly like a native app.
Do you know if there is a way to get that behaviour again? I don't like the truncated browser. Having to navigate the menus to open in chrome, I might as well open chrome and navigate to tildes.net
I don't, sorry. Maybe this app would work?
I use Firefox :P
I also have like 50 tabs open on mobile Firefox for research
That's not my problem! :P
This post was provoked some really interesting discussion around people's expectations around phones , apps and websites. I see this as a current struggle in trying to put solutions in front of people. One example being if I want to throw together something for my family, ii could make a website, then give them the link, but they expect to be able to instead it on their phone as an app. So do I now build an app for them?
Is a phone a primary utilitarian device, or can we expect people to have access to laptops? Do we limit the functionality of mobile for 'sinplicity'? Or do we completely redesign the mobile interface to be optimal for touch.
This should probably be pulled out into a discussion /post to foster more discussion on it.
As an aside, and the reason I started writing this comment. I like the functionality of the mentioned app to periodically scrape a desired page and generate notifications. It feels to me like it is trying to capture some more fundamental aspects of a native application without having to compromise with the full-blown bloat of a native app.
Unfortunately, I have to use Endless/Brave/Firefox to contain my ~ browsing on iOS, but they have their issues.
As mentioned in other comments, you can do that on Firefox. Go to tildes.net and then click the little house icon by the URL. It'll pop up something like "do you want to add this to your home screen", confirm that. That saves a "shortcut" to your home screen that essentially acts as a Tildes app. Unfortunately, I can't use the "send tab to desktop" feature this way, so I think I'll just keep browsing normally.
That's on Android. On iOS, the shortcut (which can't be set by third party browsers anyway) only opens a new tab in Safari. :(
When I tried to use Hermit every time I opened the Tildes "app" it opened the main page instead of just the last page I was browsing and it was very frustrating. Is there any way to fix this?