I’ve been really enjoying the new Total Mixology site, and really appreciate having access to your apps via the web so I can use them on my Android phone.
I have a feature request that may be simple, or may be incredibly difficult (my web development skills have 20 years of rust).
How difficult would it be to adapt it to be a progressive web app, so it can behave more like device-native software even though it’s still a website? I’ve noticed lost of sites offering this recently (including this very Discourse forum), and it really improves the user experience.
A “progressive web app” is an amorphous collection of ideas and strategies. The overall notion dates back at least to the pre-App Store iPhone. (For about fifteen minutes, Apple thought that was how third parties were going to create apps for their new product.)
Some of these ideas have non-trivial architectural implications, and others are just accumulations of UX refinements. I do not have a development team—it’s just me. In the short term, my limited resources are probably best applied to improving mobile UX as much as I can within the existing constraints of Total Mixology, the web site.
Please share any pain points and I will prioritize those!
Oh don’t get me wrong, I think the site is pretty great as-is!
I assume any kind of offline capability or caching would be the biggest lift, and while that would be awesome, I don’t know that it would be my highest priority given how and when I normally use the site.
What would make a big difference in the mobile user experience (and seems to only require a few lines of json to set up) is setting the display-mode to standalone, so that the url bar and other browser ui doesn’t take up a bunch of the screen. It seems like the site navigation is already set up in a way that users wouldn’t need the forward/back buttons to get around. But I haven’t read all of the documentation to know if there’s more to it than that.