Slashdot Mirror
WeChat Beats Google in Releasing Apps That Don't Need Downloading or Installing (mashable.com)
An anonymous reader shares a Mashable report: Click on a link in China's top messaging app, WeChat, and you'll be taken to a rich app-like experience, but without needing to download or install anything. Tencent, WeChat's maker, on Monday released "mini programs." The new mini programs work within the messaging app, and the early crop at launch include a Prisma-like photo editing app, a Pomodoro Timer productivity app, a flight search engine, and one for recipe searches. With the mini programs, the already-dominant WeChat continues its march to become practically ubiquitous on Chinese handsets, where people already use the messenger for real-life tasks like paying at restaurants, to hailing a Didi Chuxing ride. Last year, Google too announced that it would soon allow users to check out apps without downloading or installing them. The feature is yet to go live.
>> app...without needing to install anything
Congratulations - you invented the World Wide Web
If Google is using Angular or some similar "best practices" approach, they're probably still working on their framework framework framework.
eom
Gee, folks. I lived through punchcards & Fortran, semi-intelligent terminals which you could put in some "mask mode" controlled by COBOL, every user having (at least) one computer (remember Pournelle's Law?) to the OS (under the user's control) being obliterated by the browser (controlled by the advertisement company), which is, if you squint a bit, just a semi-intelligent terminal with entry masks.
It's not a loop, it's a recursion, since we are accumulating crap on the "stack" (ironically it's called like this. C.G. Jung would be delighted by this synchronicity), and this at an alarming rate. OS, browser, angular.js (or however the Browser Abstraction Layer du jour is called, I lost count). No tail call optimization.
I'm still waiting for the whole contraption to explode in some unexpected way, spreading its unsightly guts all over the place. It won't be pretty, but it'll be definitely... interesting.
But will they beat them in withdrawing support? Google are still the fastest at this.
It's called 'Chrome' (as others have pointed out).
What Google *specifically* promised was run an application without installing under android. I presume we are talking about a read chunks of the application on demand rather than requiring the whole thing to download in advance, so the application would think the device just has *really* slow storage for accessing the application payload.
However it could be as simple as changing the UI to make the download be invisible to the user (which is how web apps work, they get downloaded and cached when possible on load rather than have a distinct 'install' phase) and the 'feature' only working with small apps where that's reasonably possible.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
But do I still have to load it into RAM before I can run it?
Won't this be open to abuse?
You have app A which downloads and executes resource A from some server.
Googles anti-malware checks go, 'hey, no nasty stuff here!', grants the publish request.
Now resource A is switched out for some sneaky rootkit malware.
I always thought this was against their rules.
Maybe it is some other method. Maybe the non-apps need to be hosted via their servers.
Will need to check. If either way is allowed, it'll make an app I'm about to start insanely easier.
> I'm sure you had a point in there somewhere.
Yes, but you didn't "get" it :-)
> There is no place for perfection in computing.
I'm just waiting for the explosion. That'll be Perfect. A bit as depicted by Monty Python's Mr. Creosote.
Man, that'll be fun.
Apps!
"WeChat Beats Google in Releasing Apps That Don't Need Downloading or Installing"
A chatroom that doesn't require downloading anything? Whoop de fuckin' doo....1998 called and wants their chatroom back.
This is the most retarded "news" in months. In other words they "invented" something that's been around for almost 20 years.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
How is this different from Discord or any other web application that has existed for the last 15 years? I feel like there's some key piece I'm missing to make sense of how this isn't a totally bullshit article.
Did someone say cake?
No download?
That would mean your device gets no new data and therefore no new nothing, app or otherwise.
Marketing department speak is weird.
This appears to be a press release from Tencent, filtered through Mashable and then resubmitted to Slashdot. Was anyone excitedly waiting to see which large company released no-install-internal-to-an-application programs first? Is anyone paying attention to what gets posted?
What could possibly go wrong.
X already did this like what, 30, 40 years ago?
just wait and see. Microsoft and Google will present the same thing in 2017 for sure.
There's a name for the only apps that don't need to be installed and downloaded. It's called bloatware.
I think it was about two years ago that W3C and Smartphone manufacturers standardized (mostly) and implemented the facilities necessary for web pages to work as apps. I programmed one that long ago and somehow never thought to claim credit for the invention on Slashdot :-)
As far as I can tell, there is little need for pre-installed apps any longer, or mobile sites.
I am not a tremendous fan of the graft of Javascript and a programmable DOM to static web pages as an afterthought. But given the way it grew, and the advent of websockets and the two dozen other new web APIs, it's implemented well enough now to do pretty much whatever you want.
Bruce Perens.
Newspeak techno babble. But I gess the free ad worked ok.
Woohoo, we've come full circle. When the iPhone first came out, all we had were those shitty "web apps", then things evolved, the App Store grew out of it, and things got better.
Why would we want to go back to that? We would not, that's why.
Comes from getting 10% discount almost everywhere when using WePay.
I think they either invented the Homeopathic download-- the less you download the more capable the software is or they invented Douglas Adams computer desk. The software just watches what you do, infers what app you need, and writes it on the spot.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
On first glance, I thought it said "flight engine", as in a flight simulator, which I thought, wow, a whole flight simulator within html5.
having the history available on reconnect
HexChat and other popular IRC clients keep client-side history by default, and some IRC servers support "bouncers" that provide server-side history. I guess the reason they're not used more often is that there's a culture against keeping a permanent record of things said in a channel (IRC's term for a group chat).
being able to paste text and images and such into chat rather than resorting to pastebins
Unless the IRC client automatically authenticates to a pastebin service on the user's behalf and sends any pasted image or pasted text longer than 4 lines there.
Sure some things like emoji support may be a bit silly
Silly, yet supported in any IRC client that processes UTF-8 encoded Unicode text.