[DONE] Desktop App (PWA)

Hello,

In a world of many (many) tabs, I often need to get back to Fibery, but find there is some inertia, as I have to to open the tab, navigate into the correct space, and do what I need to do. Our Fibery is only as good as the data we input, so any friction reduces potential to capture data.

I have looked through the different threads and it seems like Native Apps are off the cards for a while.

However, has a PWA been considered (essentially a website pretending to be an app, for those unfamiliar with the term). This would give some nice benefits, such as Task Bar icon, easy to leave open all the time, etc. The feature set would also be 1 to 1 with the online version.

This would feel similar to ClickUp + Slack. Which (I believe) maintain the same interface within their Apps, though I donā€™t believe they use a PWA.

Happy New Year.

/Lau

This has been secretly on my dream list since the beginning Lau. Thanks for bringing it up.

FWIW, I have Fibery open in an extra browser window that is maximized to a separate desktop (talking about macOS here). A Firefox plugin prevents other tabs from opening in that window, and so I have a dedicated, always-open, single-tab window for Fibery that is readily available when I need it.

I am pretty satisfied with that setup, but I also I love the idea of having a desktop app. If one is built, I only hope that it will NOT be based on Electron. I donā€™t need another battery-draining CPU hog on my machine.

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Although itā€™s not the same as a PWA, I assume you know of the Menu ā†’ More Tools ā†’ Create
Shortcut option in Chrome? Brings you some of the benefits you mention, at least.

Iā€™m not sure whatā€™s involved in creating a PWA. Worth looking at.

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The chrome shortcut seem it would solve the @uniquelau 's problem. It acts like an app, can be put in the macos dock etcā€¦

A PWA supposes a few more items in the checklist, not all of them feel useful to me in Fibery :

  • some (basic at least) kind of offline support
  • a responsive design
  • can be installed on any device (including mobile).
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Interesting, I did not know that was a browser feature.

Iā€™ll give that a go (though I have a sneaky suspicion that Iā€™ll discover how much I use different tabs to separate off different activities and work).

On reflection with the PWA, the biggest barrier against it, may be Fiberyā€™s lack of a mobile support, whilst on desktop itā€™s quite nice, offering an App install for mobile would be a fairly crappy experience as Fibery doesnā€™t really work in a usable way on mobile

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Following up on this topic, switching to using the PWA has increased my usage of Fibery dramatically - having the icon in my system tray and being able to alt + tab straight to the app is the dream.

pwa-fibery-yay

There would be some value in adding the PWA install instructions into the user guide. Most people have no idea what a PWA is, how to install it, etc. What they want is an App, and if it looks like an App 9 out of 10 times thatā€™s enough for them.

Potentially this is something that should be encouraged when people sign-up, to help the sticky-ness and adoption of Fibery.

When I trailed ClickUp, I installed the app, and again that certainly helped to drive my engagement with it.

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Iā€™m using this which works really well:

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Interesting! Can you specify how it differs from a PWA in your browser of choice? I have Fibery as a ā€œstand-alone windowā€ via Edge, shortcuts in my task bar, no browser tabs in the Fibery window(s), etc. It seems very app-like, and all I did was ā€œInstall this site as an appā€ for my Fibery workspace. Not trying to say WebCatalog isnā€™t a good approach, even if itā€™s basically the same thing, Iā€™m more wondering if Iā€™m missing out on anything. :grin:

Iā€™m not sure @Oshyan. Iā€™m not familiar with your setup. I donā€™t use Edge and havenā€™t for years. Could be a similar outcome.

You can read about it here:

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What browser do you use? Edge is basically the same as Chrome as far as ā€œinstall as appā€ for web pages/PWA. I donā€™t get a clear sense of how WebCatalog might differ from that in their docs, some screenshots might help, but obviously you donā€™t need to address that for me. :smile:

Itā€™s faster to download and install it if itā€™s of interest.

One thing I can say is that with webcatalog is that you can basically be logged into the same website, with the same browser, using two different accounts, and then switch between them easily.
The usual alternative is to use chrome for one account, firefox for the other etc.

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Thaaank you Chris, that is an immediate reason to check it out!

Web Apps in new macOS Sonoma will be another option soon

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I donā€™t know the differences yet, but I recently installed Dictanote (free & awesome for speech to text). They have a ā€˜Chrome appā€™ (?)

It feels like a desktop app, although itā€™s not :sweat_smile: But it works pretty awesome!

Maybe this is really easy to implement? Would love a sort of desktop app for Fibery!

This is one thing that would increase usage of fibery. Just thinking in basic attention terms: an icon in a dock is grabbing more attention than a ā€˜who knows where it isā€™ tab.

Not to mention you can assign a global shortcut to bring that app to the front. Invaluable.

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No surprise, only available in Safari :sob:

How do they differ from Chrome web ā€œAppsā€ as outlined above?

There is always hopeā€¦

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