Weeknotes vol. 6: Web and hybrid and native, oh my!

By Garrett, : Weeknotes

A hand holding a fountain pen drawing squiggles on a sheet of paper, on a pink background

(It’s Tuesday but I’m pretending it’s last Friday.)

I’ve gone back and forth on Native v.s. Web v.s. Hybrid v.s. Native v.s. ∞ quite a bit. There are pros and cons to all of the options, but, for the initial launch, I have officially landed on the following:

  • Web app (Rails, baby!)
  • iOS (Hotwire Native)
  • macOS (A hybrid Swift app generating a web view)
  • watchOS (Native, primarily for the voice to text)

(ducks from the lettuce, etc. that Chris is going to throw.)

This way, deploying updates is as easy as git push origin main (the cheeseburger of computers) and we’ll have minimal App Store risk. What this does mean is that we need an API for watchOS, which I took care of during the early part of last (this?) week. Though it’s the core of any modern day digital product, I had little experience creating an API and did run into a few gotchas around authenticating with tokens v.s. web logins and sessions. After wrapping my head around the issue I was able to read, write, delete, etc. from the API and had a very quiet celebration in my mind.

I quickly prototyped the native watchOS app to read, write, delete via the API and get an understanding of how this particular app will look and feel so we can understand our design boundaries. And what a good use of time it was. I quickly learned that the simple app I had in my head needed to be about 10x simpler to decrease the clicks it takes from open to posted due to the required native voice to text screens and interactions. I also learned how easy it is to get that sexy swipe to delete on the listing view.

Design for the Web/Mac app is underway and is really starting to look like something. This next week will be spent excitedly getting the working app in line with this week’s design progress and answering Matt’s questions on GitHub so we can finally toggle this codebase’s invincibility mode to the on position.

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