I love this. Yes, as mentioned by others, maintenance might be an issue, but that should not be the reason to abandon the whole effort of connecting elderly people to async TV and simple home automation. I am sure there are more than enough children or relatives that are happy to assist with these maintenance tasks. The author seems to have done similar projects for a lot of his peers and it seems to work for them.
And... it's also a great reminder of how challanging it is for elderly folks (AND ourselves in the future!) to deal with the horror of multiple remotes and tech they don't understand.
In the "Why Use this Website?" section on the frontpage of his site, it reads: "Get help developing products and services that older adults actually want and need."
I applaud the mission and the effort to document all of it in a guide-like fashion. Great job!
> And... it's also a great reminder of how challanging it is for elderly folks (AND ourselves in the future!) to deal with the horror of multiple remotes and tech they don't understand.
Not just elderly. I hate multiple remotes, my wife hates multiple remotes, the kids hate multiple remotes.
Multiple remotes means that your product doesn't play nice with others, and that should be a huge red flag for the future when we have plenty of tech that lets us use a single remote.
As a Laravel user, I am extremely happy about the different paths you can take and I think it's absolutely fantastic that you are _able_ to avoid those magical things like a plague, if you don't want or need them.
I find Livewire a pleasure to work with. It's certainly not a hammer for every nail, but a refreshing step away from the JavaScript madness without sacrificing all of the good parts about it (anything async, basically).
Like I said, It becomes harder and harder to avoid it and that worries me. I used Laravel because anyone could just hop in and be productive.. I've asked myself why I'm not using just Symfony already, because I think Laravel is something that it's not anymore, or wasn't ever. Laravel is basically Taylor's view on how people should write code.
Breeze and Jetstream are more recent optional packages, and Laravel is still productive without them. So effectively you are saying, “I wish Docker Hub had fewer images available, it’s more productive without.” Pfffft
I get your point and this conversation might be as old as Laravel itself. I would like to point out a couple of things though:
The "hop in and be productive" part is directly related to Laravel being pretty opinionated. It's hard to have the one without the other. I think it's comparable to Steve Jobs, who had pretty strong opinions about certain things, too. The end result is a "product" that doesn't try to be the right fit for everyone.
Livewire, just like Jetstream[1] etc. is opt-in. When Jetstream was introduced, there was quite an uproar (by parts of the community) about Laravel forcing users into Livewire or Inertia[2]. The end result was (imho) a very healthy shift in communication around it (to emphasize the opt-in part), followed by the introduction of Breeze[3], which goes to show that Taylor does recognize the reservations some people may have about those new shiny toys.
It's a very natural thing that big projects like that will have an ever-growing feature set. That is an important part of keeping existing users excited. The Jetstream-discussion has been an important lesson for the team (I hope) and I'm glad it ended the way it did.
You can still build your Laravel app in a pretty similar fashion as you would have done 5 years ago and if you want, you can make use of the recent additions, so I think there's not too much to worry about to be honest. If you have outgrown the magic, isn't it pretty amazing that you can drop down one level of abstraction and just use symfony? Also, do you think you would've grasped many of the underlying features of symfony, if it wasn't for Laravel's opinionated wrapping in a nicer syntax (pardon my oversimplification)?
Nevertheless, I think it's good to keep up the warning signs and have this discussion from time to time. ;-)
I have to admit, I'm still a bit biased against Taylor because of the Jetstream fiasco, but it seems it's getting harder to justify those feelings. Thanks for refreshing things.
Yes. But that is the case of all other tools and frameworks: a product devised by an individual's (or a group of individuals), opinion, taste and experience.
My god, I haven't seen Craft before and... I haven't been so hyped about a software in a while. It's the perfect sweet-spot between Bear and Notion. Seriously... thank you!
At first I was a little concerned when I saw Notions "block concept" and it doesn't feel as snappy as Bear because of that, but the way you can start a new related document super easily from each block is just really good. The Search is amazing, changes are insta-synced between devices (like... live as you type) spending a little time on cards makes your doc look pretty good (if you care) and the share-options are all I ever wanted.
I also like the separation of "daily notes" and your regular documents. With Bear the sidebar always feels a little messy (despite pinning), but if daily docs are moved to a separate area that is ordered by time, it cleans up the "stage" for my more important, long-enduring notes.
I just spent about an hour testing the waters with Craft, but this is love at first sight so far!
I had déjà vu when I read this comment, as I think I tweeted almost word for word your first paragraph when I discovered Craft.
I’m something of an unpaid evangelist for it - it’s pretty close to life changing software for me, as it’s completely changed how I think and write. Glad you love it!
They have an extremely active Slack community that’s well-staffed, and their extremely responsive to feature requests. Their pace of development over the first year of their launch is incredible.
OP has been putting out a series of useful tools lately [1] and been very transparent about his process on Twitter [2].
Seeing this thread derail into a discussion about PHP is pretty annoying. It seems to happen to anything PHP-related here. Do that all day long please, if someone comes here saying PHP is the best language... but he created something useful and open sourced it - that deserves more than toxic bike shedding about your favorite toys.
Thanks a lot for that blog post (and the update)! That was super insightful and interesting to me.
Setting up a screen reader and actually experiencing the way a blind person views the web has been on my list of things to do for the longest time, but ditched time and again in favor of the latest hotness in our industry.
Reading bits like “crime against humanity” in relation to improperly used form elements are a good reminder of the responsibility we have when it comes to the semantic output of our work, which makes me wonder:
How usable are interface-heavy reactive UIs to you? How - if at all - are screen readers picking up on changing parts of an interface?
Which brings me back to setting up a screen reader myself... Is there a guide you know of to set up a VM to experience the web like a blind person does, or is installing a screen reader in combination with a regularly set up browser fine for accessibility testing?
Cheers and... I wish you all the best for your dev-career! I am super impressed.
> How usable are interface-heavy reactive UIs to you? How - if at all - are screen readers picking up on changing parts of an interface?
In general, screen readers don't automatically announce changes in a web page or other UI. For web pages, if something should be automatically read when it's changed or added, it should be marked as an ARIA live region, using the aria-live attribute. Some native GUI toolkits have a similar feature, e.g. the LiveSetting property in Windows UI Automation.
I strongly discourage using a VM to test with a screen reader, because audio in a VM is often annoyingly laggy. Just do it on your main machine. On macOS, you can turn VoiceOver on and off with Command+F5. On Windows 10 version 1703 (Creators Update) or later, you can turn Narrator on or off with Control+Windows+Enter. Another popular screen reader for Windows is the open-source NVDA (https://www.nvaccess.org/). For Unix-based desktops, GNOME has the Orca screen reader; other desktop environments have nothing AFAIK. iOS has VoiceOver, Android has TalkBack, and Chrome OS has ChromeVox.
Disclosure: I work for Microsoft on the Narrator team.
I am a great fan (as much as one can be a fan of an analytics tool) and advocate for matomo. They even have server log analytics with no client-side tracking whatsoever.
We're using it for a big variety of clients small to big and sure, it's less capable than Google Analytics, but then again – most of our clients are just interested in simple visitor statistics to validate certain assumptions, not whether or not James Doe's engagement with our site has been 4.32% better after his second Flat White at Starbucks.
When ever there's a viable alternative to a Google product – go for it. Matomo is 100% viable and I feel much better tracking (anonymous!) user-behavior this way.
After closing the huge sign-up popup, dismissing the Medium-App-suggestion and closing the cookie-banner I lost all interest in reading the article, which is a shame.
I sometimes hate the internet.
At least the HN comments were insightful, unlike my rambling. Sorry about that.
"After closing the huge sign-up popup, dismissing the Medium-App-suggestion and closing the cookie-banner I lost all interest in reading the article, which is a shame."
If everyone on HN spoke up about this maybe this issue would get fixed. Ban any site that bombards us with pop-ups or begs us to disable private mode from HN and this place would be a lot better off.
I was trying to read it on an iPhone using Safari. The mobile "experience" is way, way worse compared to that on a big screen. At least two thirds of my screen estate were blocked by popups and that's how the vast majority of (mobile) users are going to experience it as well.
I am using Gridsome in combination with CraftCMS (and CraftQL) for a client project. The moment you understand how to write a content-plugin based on your own needs, everything falls into place and makes it a pretty useful piece of tech. So if you like Vue and are a little jealous towards React-people about GatsbyJS – give it a shot!
And... it's also a great reminder of how challanging it is for elderly folks (AND ourselves in the future!) to deal with the horror of multiple remotes and tech they don't understand.
In the "Why Use this Website?" section on the frontpage of his site, it reads: "Get help developing products and services that older adults actually want and need."
I applaud the mission and the effort to document all of it in a guide-like fashion. Great job!