Technology

One of the best things about Android, the world’s most popular operating system for mobile devices, has always been its customizability. For the truly adventurous, that’s often meant ditching your manufacturer’s preinstalled software and installing a custom ROM, essentially a third-party operating system. In recent years, it feels like the popularity of custom ROMs has declined as manufacturers and carriers have made it harder to install them, and improvements to Android have made the advantages of a custom ROM less obvious.

This won’t mean much to many, but there seems to be a small number of people stymied by a weird problem: some Snap apps won’t work on Linux. You install a Snap app, and it might work the first time you launch it. But every subsequent time you launch the app, nothing happens. There’s no error message or indication that anything is wrong; your app just won’t start. If you run snap run appname in your terminal, you won’t see anything, either, but the app still won’t launch. I’d had this issue with a couple of Snap apps (namely the Authy two-factor authentication app and HEY Mail). It’s an issue that’s frustrated me for a year, and one for which I’ve searched in vain for a solution. But the apps weren’t critical enough that I spent any serious effort tracking down the issue until now.

Hey email launched in mid-June to generally positive reviews, but coverage of the product itself was largely overshadowed by a fight between HEY and Apple regarding HEY’s monetization strategy.¹ I’ve been using HEY now for about a month, and it’s a fantastic product, great enough to justify its $99 per year price tag (and I hate subscription apps). So what exactly is HEY, and why is it worth paying for email when there are so many free email products out there?

About a month ago, I wrote about developing a static website with server-side Javascript. As I discovered, there are a lot of advantages to a static site. But one of the disadvantages to the lack of a database is that it isn’t obvious how to make the site searchable. With no database to pull from, generating search results can be a challenge.

Rather than pull search results from a database and generating results pages with server-side scripts, static sides tend to opt for storing results in a single file or external database and relying on AJAX to submit queries of the search index. That’s easier said than done, though. Every time you update the site, you need to rebuild the index (whether it’s a JSON file or a database hosted somewhere else). Then, when your users are actually searching the website, you need to set up the AJAX calls to the index and transform the response into a user interface.

I’ve experimented with server-side JavaScript in the past, but I finally had an opportunity to dig in and actually build a website with it. I have a lot of experience with JavaScript in general; one of my major professional projects over the past few years was developing a complex web application entirely in JavaScript. For a number of reasons, I had to work only with vanilla JavaScript (no frameworks or libraries like jQuery). But server-side Javsacript is an enitrely different challenge.

Just a few days ago, I wrote about setting up my GNOME desktop on Linux. Unfortunately, the current state of play in the GNOME world is that it’s just really hard to make the desktop look polished. While there are a lot of themes that look nice, I’ve found a minor issues with almost all of them. I just couldn’t settle on a combination that satisfied me. That may change when Ubuntu adopts GNOME as its default desktop environment; Ubuntu is one of the most-used Linux distros, and it has an active community that creates a lot of great stuff. For now, though, I’ve decided to try Elementary OS for a while.