Tooling for App. Dev

Feature Requests
1

Hi there, I’m not a web dev, so I don’t know how helpful this tool would be, but I remember reading somewhere that part of the challenge of converting relight to mobile native apps is having to learn Swift/Kotlin. Just was this video about Expo based on React and didn’t know if it might be helpful.

Every blessing

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2

It’s funny that you mention this. We haven’t said anything about this publicly because we’re not sure it’s going to work out, but I’ve been looking at a somewhat similar technology to this called Capacitor (which I would combine with another tool called Electron). The main difference is that it involves even less custom code, supports more platforms (iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, and even Linux), and it is more compatible with my existing Vue.JS codebase. It’s actually the same technology that makes Obsidian work on all the platforms they support.

I’ve already got a branch where I’m working on implementing this, but the steps to completion will need to include:

  • Upgrading the current codebase to the latest version of Vue/Nuxt so that all of the following steps aren’t built on something outdated and will be less likely to eventually need a painful overhaul
  • Building out a system for managing tabs so that we don’t lose existing features that people have in a web browser. This will involve some architectural changes, which is why I want to make sure the codebase is up-to-date first.
  • Testing to the best of my ability on platforms I don’t own (like Android) using a simulator, but then really leaning on the community of existing users to beta test on their own devices since we can’t afford to buy dedicated devices for testing.

Again, I really don’t know if this will work out ultimately, or how long it will take, which is why we haven’t made any public posts about it. I can say that I’m somewhat optimistic that I could have a beta for iOS out within the next couple of months, but developers are always somewhat optimistic and rarely justified in said attitude. :rofl:

One thing worth noting is that this won’t bring offline support. Supporting simple features like reading and studying would be hypothetically possible once we have an app, but it’s a separate project. Also advanced features like Related Content and the site-wide search (distinct from just using Omnibar to navigate) will likely always be an online-only feature, since they rely on a database that cannot presently be run on mobile devices.

We’re really excited for this and I’ve been spending a lot of my free time on it, but I’m not sure if/when we’ll have anything to show for it.

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