[HN Gopher] Polypane: A browser for responsive and accessible de...
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Polypane: A browser for responsive and accessible development
Author : cedricr
Score : 84 points
Date : 2021-11-25 10:35 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (polypane.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (polypane.app)
| beyondcompute wrote:
| Should consumers start pushing back against subscription-based
| pricing models more actively at this point?
| cedricr wrote:
| It's an economic model that is certainly not for everybody, nor
| for everything, but for dev tools that help me earn money, I
| can't see the problem. And if I stop paying for it tomorrow,
| and don't have access to it anymore, you know what? My site
| will still be online.
| tentacleuno wrote:
| > It's an economic model that is certainly not for everybody,
|
| Not calling you out directly OP (in fact, I quite like your
| project), but the subscription model is pretty badly thought
| out most of the time IMO. Especially in a commercial setting.
| You really should not have to pay a company a monthly fee to
| operate cameras you bought, on your property. These trojan
| horse subscriptions are then normally paired with other anti-
| people abuses, e.g. not allowing the user to use basic
| functionalities without the subscription.
|
| > My site will still be online.
|
| Just curious: what would happen if your website went offline?
| If your application is _phoning home_ to verify a license,
| and the website comes back with an unexpected / no response
| (maybe you let the hosting run out), would the software still
| be usable? I think there should be more provisions against
| this sort of thing in subscription-payed applications.
| cedricr wrote:
| I'm not affiliated with the project; just discovered it by
| chance this morning and found it deserved to be better
| known. So, when I said 'My site will still be online", I
| meant as a web developper using Polypane, when and if I
| decide to stop paying the subscription, this will have no
| impact on the web site I've developped with it.
| Subscriptions might be a problem when you risk loosing
| access to your data (looking at you Adobe), but in this
| particular case I couldn't see the problem.
| nishs wrote:
| Are there particular Adobe product that do this? I use
| Adobe XD which is subscription-based but it allows saving
| my work locally.
| eejjjj82 wrote:
| Sure. Don't buy it
| tentacleuno wrote:
| As a whole, subscription-based models are pretty bad for
| society. Companies have figured out subscriptions are _so_ much
| better because A) they 're not paid all at once, making the
| device attractive, and B) you can constantly drip dry money out
| of the customer's bank account. It's a great business model for
| _businesses_ , though.
| t0astbread wrote:
| Maybe a weird but honest question: How is/was software even
| able to finance itself without subscriptions? People expect
| updates and support which are continuous expenses.
|
| One alternative, I guess, are full-price major revisions at
| semi-regular intervals. But won't that result in many people
| never getting an upgrade because they feel it's not worth it?
| mouzogu wrote:
| I like this, but why the heck do I need to pay a monthly
| subscription. That alone has put me off the trying it out.
|
| I would rather just pay a one off fee, maybe for a 2-3 year
| license.
| defanor wrote:
| That's yet another accessibility-related project with a website
| that is broken if accessibility features (e.g., slightly
| configured FF with minimal font sizes and colours set) or textual
| web browsers (e.g., lynx) are used. It seems that such projects
| tend to pick some very narrow view of what accessibility should
| be about, and only focus on that. I'd say it's ironic, to have
| inaccessible websites for accessibility-related projects, but at
| this point it just looks like a general rule.
| harrybr wrote:
| Sizzy is a similar product that I've been using for a year or
| two. It's pretty good:
|
| https://sizzy.co/
|
| Monthly licence fee: PS5.36/month Annual: PS39.07/yr Lifetime:
| PS152.43
| marban wrote:
| Also included in Setapp.
| molszanski wrote:
| Also amazing
| rado wrote:
| Keep in mind that mobile Safari behaves differently and a resized
| Chrome is not enough.
| wildrhythms wrote:
| Yes, my issue with these types of 'services' always is that it
| only 'emulates' the screen resolution. They might as well just
| be iframes locked to specific resolutions; the result is that
| it's still my own browser doing the rendering. What I want is
| some kind of reverse-polyfill that accurately reflects the
| rendering capabilities.
| a2128 wrote:
| "No credit card needed" on a browser download was really weird to
| see
| dotancohen wrote:
| I paid for Opera. $20 20 years ago was not a trivial amount of
| money, especially for a student.
| yvoschaap wrote:
| Happy to see this here on HN. I usually get the sense Chrome
| Inspector new features seem to be inspired with what Polypane
| usually already offers.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| The SaaS pricing of these tools is getting out of hand.
| EUR108/year for this. Another hundred for retool, another hundred
| for Postman, mmhmm / camera apps, Notion, Gmail, Trello/Jira,
| Github/Gitlab, Slack, an image resizing service, some load
| testing tool, Figma.. now every developer has a $1000+ monthly
| burn rate (!).
|
| Can we go back to buying plain software licenses?
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Most of the tools you listed are hosted services, not products
| you buy once. Gmail, Trello, Slack, Figma, and Jira are all
| closed source components on a hosted platform. Their core
| features are that you can use them and collaborate on them
| without taking care of running the actual software itself.
|
| You can switch to alternative you host yourself. RocketChat or
| Element instead of Slack, Gitlab instead of Github, you name
| it. There are tons of open source and closed source alternative
| to all the cool hosted platforms if you dare look outside what
| everyone else is using.
|
| This strategy incurs the cost of maintenance and management,
| which is why in many cases the hosted services are usually
| cheaper. Getting Gitlab on a $10 VPS isn't a problem, but
| getting regular backups, failovers, etc. is incredible
| difficult.
|
| My personal developer burn rate is less than $50 per month. The
| company I work for doesn't even need pay for Docker's fancy
| account with higher limits because there's no need to, even if
| you run containers all day. You don't have to use all these
| expensive online services if you're willing to run some
| software in-house, but don't underestimate the cost of paying
| someone to set up all those cost-saving services.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| I've mostly switched to the self-hosted side.
|
| Yes - there is some initial ramp up time and some hurdles to
| face (and I actually ended up going the self-hosted K8s
| route, which is definitely a lot of additional ramp up time,
| but IMO - worth it.)
|
| That said... I save a _LOT_ of money.
|
| Currently hosting
|
| - Bookstack
|
| - Seafile
|
| - Jellyfin
|
| - Grocy
|
| - Drone.io
|
| - Gitlab
|
| - Youtrack
|
| - Keycloak
|
| - OpenHab
|
| ~$50/year for dynamic dns. ~$15/year for hostnames. ~$5/year
| for backup and long term storage (this varies, but is often
| within the free tier on backblaze unless I have to restore a
| service).
|
| Or about $5/month (not including the internet, which I
| already pay for anyways, and the hardware, which is literally
| my old/outdated machines running micro-k8s, and a NAS).
|
| The maintenance can be annoying every now and then - but it's
| also the kind of work I don't really mind, and it's a nice
| exercise to stay up-to-date on tech I end up interacting with
| in the office anyways.
| theamk wrote:
| Why on earth would you pay monthly for image resizing tool?
| Also, not quite sure what load testing tool you mean, but there
| is a chance local version would be enough.
|
| You can go to buying plain software licenses, but I most people
| don't bother.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| s/monthly/yearly
| quda wrote:
| In 2021 they ask for money for a humble browser. Burn!
| speedgoose wrote:
| It's too expensive for me.
| cgrs wrote:
| Open source alternative: https://responsively.app/
| sillycube wrote:
| I am using this one. There are a few apps monetizing this idea
| with a paid option. But I don't see what is extra except there
| is a price tag
| CallMeMarc wrote:
| If you like Open Source, I've been using Responsively which seems
| to be roughly the same but without any monthly subscription.
|
| https://github.com/responsively-org/responsively-app
| seeekr wrote:
| Trying it out on Intel macos, getting 100% CPU usage in a project
| (Vite, SvelteKit) while not interacting with the page at all.
| bennyp101 wrote:
| I used this last year when I was working on a new site for
| something, I ended up paying for a month, then cancelling. I used
| it pretty much everyday, so I think, the PS9 was well worth it.
|
| There are obviously still browser quirks that needed ironing out,
| but this got me a good way there in multiple screen sizes at the
| same time - seeing how a little change looks instantly across
| different screens was super helpful.
|
| Edit: The dev was super responsive as well, I emailed about a bug
| that I found, and he emailed back a version to test with the fix
| in, with the full version being rolled out later in the week.
| sleepycatgirl wrote:
| Ehhh.. seems it is closed source, and if so, I am not exactly
| happy to try it at all...
|
| Browser, handling so much important stuff, being closed source is
| a bit of... just no.
| cedricr wrote:
| The rendering engine is Chromium so... that's the most
| important thing as far as I'm concerned. At least for this
| usage: it's a browser for web development, not for everyday
| use.
| jve wrote:
| Is it you that audit the code or just having a piece of mind
| with the thought: "Someone MUST HAVE looked at that code and if
| I haven't stumbled upon any bad press, probably this is good to
| go!"? Maybe you are running some automated tools that
| identifies whether particular software accesses data it doesn't
| have to or makes network connections etc?
|
| Something being open source doesn't automatically mean it is
| secure. On the other hand, any software running on your pc
| requires you to put trust in the developers. I think it would
| be easier to just setup monitoring (like preventing outgoing
| traffic or identifying DNS lookups etc) and limiting
| permissions on what particular software can do, be it black or
| white box. White box of course allows running some analyzers,
| but... do any non-contributors actually do it?
|
| I remember seeing some tool here, don't remember - was it
| Microsoft made or what? That scanned the code and tried to
| identify what accesses software makes.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| If it is your intent, it's also disturbingly easy to hide
| behavior from code reviewers. The Underhanded C Coding
| Contest has a lot of examples of this type of stuff:
| http://www.underhanded-c.org/_page_id_25.html
|
| I can already hear some of you starting to type a rant about
| how this actually is a C problem and not something that would
| happen in a modern language like
| ${YOUR_FAVORITE_LANGUAGE:-rust}; and to an extent it is true
| that C is especially vulnerable to this particular vector of
| attack, but like it or not a lot of open source software if
| it isn't written in C, depends on libraries that are. This
| includes the Linux kernel, OpenSSL, cURL. WebKit is written
| in C++ which might as well be C for the sake of this
| discussion. Other languages have other attack vectors, like
| the fractal-like dependency tree of NPM for example,
| something that has been demonstrated time and time again to
| be more than a hypothetical security risk.
| elondaits wrote:
| In case someone from Polypane drops by:
|
| Your pricing page breaks completely when accessing it from
| Argentina where prices are "larger" (ej. "ARS 1,037.20" for the
| Individual plan).
|
| Worse, I see no way to change the currency. You shouldn't assume
| that because I accessed from Argentina the price in Argentine
| Pesos is helpful for me (it isn't). You should provide a way to
| change the currency (normally people put it in the footer) or not
| try to match currency with visitors based solely on the
| geolocation of their IP address.
| otrahuevada wrote:
| I'm in Uruguay and it gave me Euros as currency? I'm not sure
| what 3rd party they're using for this but it looks like it
| could use some fine tuning
| kadomony wrote:
| Their pricing breaks the entire deal for me. :) Just use the
| free alternative Responsively.
| MrDresden wrote:
| This.
|
| I rarely speak the language of the country I may be in atm.
|
| I rarely use the currency of the country I may be in atm.
|
| Please, do not try to be smart about these things.
| elondaits wrote:
| The language thing is terrible. I use the English version of
| Chrome on an English language MacOS, configured English as my
| preferred language with Spanish as the second option (which
| are sent to the site)... and of I travel to Germany many
| internationalized sites decide I want to read in German... or
| Portuguese in Brazil. Language options and localization are
| old as time but sites use defaults based on IP addresses.
| nnf wrote:
| As long as there's an easy way for the user to choose a
| different language and currency, it seems defaulting based on
| location would be correct for the highest percentage of
| users, unless you have some reason to believe it's more
| likely that your audience is, say, English-speaking users who
| prefer to see prices in USD.
| MrDresden wrote:
| In the vast amount of cases there is never any (clear or
| otherwise) option to set the language of the site. This has
| held true for Google as well as small mom and pops web
| shops.
|
| Larger entities like Google can just send you into
| redirection hell sometimes if you try to set a language
| (where you can even find the option).
|
| Others decline to show you the content since it is not
| "available in your part of the world" even though what you
| were doing was simply setting the language of the webpage,
| not changing its location in the world (I have been
| temporarily in the Netherlands now for a few months and
| this keeps happening on .nl domains!).
|
| If the page is a for a SaaS, the pricing structure should
| allow me to select from all of the options they have. I do
| not want to be forced to only have prices in DKK, SEK, EURO
| or US if it is just tied to the location that the page
| _thinks_ I am coming from.
|
| Here I'm obviously excluding cases where the
| store/saas/service is location specific (i.e shop.se for
| Sweden for instance).
| zamadatix wrote:
| > In the vast amount of cases there is never any (clear
| or otherwise) option to set the language of the site.
|
| Unless manually disabled for privacy reasons (in which
| case... well yeah) your browser sends a weighted list of
| your language preferences with the HTTP request, the
| option on the site should only be an override.
|
| > This has held true for Google as well as small mom and
| pops web shops.
|
| Google follows the above language list unless your
| account or temporary session settings override it. Mom
| and pop probably don't know how to support more than one
| language let alone how to implement it well.
| ImprobableTruth wrote:
| There's the accept-language http header that any browser
| sends depending on your system language, no need to guess
| based on location.
| brokenkebab wrote:
| On language you may be right. On currency, it's
| complicated. In economically unstable countries people
| generally prefer to count in USD, or EUR, especially if
| it's something which has to be paid across borders.
| tentacleuno wrote:
| > Please, do not try to be smart about these things.
|
| There must be some sort of sales benefit to it, otherwise
| websites wouldn't be doing it. I'm guessing the main
| advantage is when it gets the currency right, it's easier to
| buy the product.
| laurent123456 wrote:
| Stripe recommends setting the currency based on the
| detected country, as that apparently increases conversion.
| easton wrote:
| Speaking anecdotally, it does. Sometimes (not as much in
| the past couple years with Adafruit) I've been shopping
| for electronics kits on the internet and would usually
| bounce when the prices weren't in USD. Occasionally I'd
| see the magic switch currency button, but usually it's
| 10px wide somewhere I don't see it.
| kingcharles wrote:
| Not true. I've made i8n features like that in the past for
| companies where they thought it would be nice and did not
| put any research, before or after launch, into whether
| there was any benefit whatsoever.
|
| "Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether
| or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they
| should." -- Dr. Ian Malcolm.
| tentacleuno wrote:
| > Not true. I've made i8n features like that in the past
| for companies where they thought it would be nice and did
| not put any research, before or after launch, into
| whether there was any benefit whatsoever.
|
| That makes sense in a way. Managers tend to implement
| features nonsensically, as Hacker News constantly reminds
| me :-)
|
| What would be the best compromise in your opinion, then:
| doing this magic automatically and giving the user an
| option, asking them up-front, etc. ...?
| chrismorgan wrote:
| Presenting such converted prices (without saying "this is an
| approximation") also requires that you lock in the price in
| that currency indefinitely (which is possible, but I'd be
| surprised), or else you're lying to your customers about the
| price.
|
| I can't find any plausible correlation between the prices it's
| presenting me (AUD745.40 billed annually for the business plan)
| and any base currency. The Individual-to-Business ratio
| suggests 9 and 39 units of currency per month, but which that
| would be, I don't know. "Includes VAT" makes the whole thing a
| mess; European VAT is inapplicable in Australia, though if they
| do enough business here they should register for GST (and the
| procedure for skipping that taax is different, too: in Europe
| the buyer gives the seller their VAT ID and the seller removes
| the VAT charge, but in Australia the seller charges GST and
| business clients can claim it back from the Tax Office in their
| Business Activity Statement).
|
| Making this worse, the page source has a JSON-LD block listing
| an aggregate price range of USD9-49, which I'm pretty sure is
| just flat-out wrong.
| sergiomattei wrote:
| As a counterpoint to most comments here, I've been using Polypane
| for a couple years now and it's been an invaluable tool in my
| arsenal.
|
| I don't mind that it's not open source, it's made by an indie dev
| that's super responsive and really cares about helping people
| making better websites.
|
| Keep it up, Kilian!
| joshmanders wrote:
| Co-sign this! Kilian is the man!
| lobstrosity420 wrote:
| I don't mind paying a subscription for a quality product but
| 60USD a month is very excessive.
| nnf wrote:
| Where are you seeing $60/mo? The pricing page shows $11/mo for
| an individual (or $9/mo for annual) or $47/mo for a team of up
| to 10 (or $39/mo for annual).
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(page generated 2021-11-25 23:01 UTC)