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Do people really build SPAs that are just websites and not ‘apps’?


Reading comments here, Reddit or other places my guess is lots of people don’t know the difference between just a website and an app. Even ones that seem experienced.

Lots of newcomers are struggling and not understanding what are the options and which approach is best for their case.

Business people don’t help as they rightfully don’t care. But they want „do everything” - „pay once” approach so people bolt on static pages ona apps or other way around.


I have over ten years experience and the distinction isn't always clear to me.

Example: This logistics SPA I was building I realized could just be single pages with some data for most of the stuff (tracking, inventory, etc...) but for admins they wanted a whole dashboard. This was a conditional on some value of the stored session user. So it ended up being kinda a website for parts of it and an SPA admin panel if the user conditionally matched some privileges. Probably should have been separate stacks but they used the same data so early on they made it the same Next app.

I don't think the whole website vs app thing is always as simple as static blog pages vs full fledged JS-heavy app. There is a spectrum and overlap even within a single "application" because of various requirements.

Your last sentence is the most accurate. I don't think its primarily ignorance, its just trying to meet all the requirements while retaining some level of organization in the codebase.


Sadly, yes. Fortunately, most of them are developers’ toys, but not all.


I mean the docs of most of the frameworks are written in that framework even though its just static pages. Didn't even need the framework but not using your own framework for docs feels ... bad I guess?


Don’t they need to pay for the plane ticket?


No they mean that a family member in the US gives them some of their own money, but records it to a family ledger. At some other point funds or value will be transferred, but it isn't transferred within the family for every payment.

Similar to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala


This is exactly what it is. I kind of dig it and I'm glad I know the name now


Someone posted a link in response to you, but no money actually crosses borders.

I think the best way to explain it is an example.

My contact needs to get money to his family across the world. I happen to have a cousin that I love and trust who lives there and runs a gas station. My contact gives me 10k USD + a fee and then I call my cousin and tell him to give 10k to the contact's family member if they give the right password. At the end of the year, I meet up with my cousin and I bring him some gold or other goods depending on what our deficits are to each other.


Is piracy a concern? Or are there good enough libraries to implement a client side license key mechanism?


I used to worry about it a lot but now I have made peace with it. It's a cat and mouse game. Pirates will always find a way no matter how hard you make it to crack. There's no way to make it impossible to crack.


Just make it hard enough to keep the mostly-honest people honest.


Yeah that's what I've done!


This is not always good for the end user. Now I have to go to google maps manually because it’s most of the time no longer integrated with google search


what exactly prevents them from giving me a dropdown with links to apple maps, kagi maps, bing maps and google maps and my choice gets saved to my google account as the default? Instead all they show me is a useless javascript map which is still google maps but I cant do anything useful on it and it's super frustrating trying to get to a map for a place search


To play devils advocate - it costs money to integrate with all the competing map providers and to display them properly on the site. You could think of a plug in approach where map providers integrate themselves, still someone needs to maintain that plug in infra. Nothing is free.

And it’s the same story for any kind of service that’s subject to DMA.


Yes but this is a multi billion dollar company and the base integration could be as simple as opening the link and it doesn't even have to link to the correct place. They can have the ui make clear that it's a generic link to another map site. Although I just figured out how to link to something with a query text on bing in a minute: https://www.bing.com/maps?q=USA The exact same thing works on kagi.com/maps btw. So I don't think that this is too much to ask for, I rather think that they are trying to create pressure on the EU.


> it doesn't even have to link to the correct place.

That's an obvious DMA violation. You can't preference your own service over others, like when you link to the exact pin on your service but just the general area on another.


They already commit a DMA violation by showing any google map at all then. It's not rocket science to conform to the spirit of the law, if they offer a simple API for other map providers to provide their own strings to google it will be solved in a day. They clearly just don't want to actually advertise other mapping providers for free which is something I understand fully btw. But the way they are currently doing it is actively hurting them because I hate how I can't jump to any map from the searc results now.


Google does a million things that cost money, every day. But this particular thing costing money is a problem. How about no.


If you do all the things that cost money, you can suddenly find yourself not being the big company anymore.


They don't want to link to their competition, so they'd rather not link to their own service and if users complain they tell them to complain to the EU.


That's Google's fault. They could offer an api for other map providers to be displayed.


And how many times did you do that :))


The great thing about them selling you something made to be as crappy as you will stand, is that then you'll then have to refund it all the time, making their re-targeting ads even more "effective" :)) What a virtuous cycle!


Not sure about nowadays, but a few years ago yes. You could run a foreground(?) service which kept an icon in the righthand corner (can’t remember too well). Anyway, I had an app which kept a http server always running.


I don’t know much about how these models work, but does this mean that a lot of ‘smartness’ that they show in how they articulate the answers are just them ‘parroting’ the contractors who ‘role played ai’?


How does one detect the finder patterns when they are not squares?


Not sure. But I'm guessing that the finder patters represent a pattern that is not possible in the data encoding. That is, according the the encoding scheme you couldn't have data that, just by chance looked like a finder pattern.

Also: A more fun and technical sounding term for "finder pattern" is "Fiducial" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiducial_marker


I treat most shortened links as the maker has some interest with it, wants to track something, earn something, which I find dishonest. Assuming this is an amazon url, the product page is not even a long url.


Which country?


sweden/germany


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