(2023-12-12) Bjarnason Feeling The Itch

Baldur Bjarnason: Feeling The Itch. Since I turned freelancer three years ago – almost exactly three years now – the only greenfield project I’ve been involved with was one I started myself, but that ran out of funding after the research and prototyping stage and finding additional funding here in Iceland proved extremely tricky. Colophon Cards

That’s also effectively what happened with Rebus Ink. The actual story is a bit more complicated, but it boiled down to us not getting the chance to take the project from the prototype stage, where the code and design was still filled with bad ideas and experiments that didn’t go anywhere, to product stage where the design has been boiled down to just The Stuff That Worked.

Even though it’s pretty close to the opposite of sensible, I’m beginning to feel the urge to work on something completely new again, but for slightly different reasons this time.

One reason is that I learned a lot from doing so much research and prototyping over the past decade

But the other reason is that there are just so many new exciting features available in the web platform that, if applied to a completely new project with no baggage, should be huge boons to productivity.

Import maps is the obvious one.

Cascade Layers let us rethink from scratch the structure of our stylesheets

I’ve been waiting for container queries my entire career.

Even though I think nesting in CSS is a generally bad idea, there is one exception: nesting media queries

Full module support in both the main thread and in workers is a big change

Shared Workers being supported everywhere except Chrome Android.

Atomics and SharedArrayBuffer getting broad support

Origin Private File System is inherently easier to understand and use than IndexedDB. It’s a sandboxed file system for your page! You don’t need to understand transactions or queries or the IndexedDB event model. It’s just a matter of saving and working with files.

Many hosting providers such as Render or Fly have wildcard SSL domains support built in.

It should be a surprise to anybody that a web dev looking over all of these new toys would get the urge to use them on something real.

The question, as always, is what?

It can’t be too ambitious as it needs to be a side project that can be bootstrapped alongside paying work. The mistake I made with Colophon Cards was that it had much too broad a scope.

It also needs to be something people will use. Theoretical projects, that turn out not to interest actual users, is the mistake we made with Rebus Ink.

But the problem also needs to be a bit interesting.

The figurative elephant in the room is “AI”

getting involved in generative models today is a bit like trying to find safe applications for radium during the “golden age” of radium snake-oil products. It’s a genuinely useful material, but anybody doing anything to feed an in-progress full-blown financial bubble for a risky technology is either a fool or a criminal, and I’m only occasionally the former.

But generative models are changing the landscape specifically of the product types where I have some expertise: reading and writing.

Everything is all about generating bullshit and replacing existing work with something worse.

The problem with reading software is that, most of the time, reading is a feature, not an app, a cost-centre not a profit centre

Even when you have genuine “reading is all we do” apps, like ebook apps, those tend to be saddled with dire economics. They are usually ecommerce platforms who, because of the toxic dynamics of most app stores, can’t directly be ecommerce platforms

The only reading apps that seem to have some life are in the “read-it-later” segment. There’s some crossover there with bookmarking services, but there seems to be some life in the field. Bookmarking in general seems to be large enough to support a number of competing services

The problem with both read-it-later and bookmarking apps is that they are hit quite hard by the web platform’s lack of support for being a share target. There is a non-standard proposal supported by Chromium, but that’s dead in the water without Mozilla or Apple on board.

Another subgenre of reading apps are markup or annotation software.

these often end up being features in larger platforms

And, again, you’re competing directly with built-in OS features that seem to be improving every year.

The problem with competing with OS features is that to avoid getting stomped out, you need to specialise, and for a specialised app to be sustainable you need to find a niche where people are willing to pay – either with time or money. (warm niche)

The other genre of apps where I have some familiarity would be note-taking or writing apps. The problem here is that even simple writing apps are not simple.

There are open source libraries that help but most of the libraries that genuinely address

are some of the most complex pieces of software you can find on the web, like ProseMirror or CodeMirror.

The good news here is there seems to be endless demand for all sorts of writing or note-taking tools.

Still a very tough problem to crack and the entire point of scratching my app dev itch is to find something narrow enough in scope to be doable, but broad enough to be a thing.

The alternative is to try and find something else within my expertise to work on.

Web dev?

Photography?

Project management?