This is our third and final round of apps and tutorials for our FFDW grant. In this round we have four new apps and tutorials as well as some final thoughts for what we want next.
This time around we had a mix of working more on some foundational tutorials and some usable apps that people could customize for themselves.
First up is Dirk's final tweak to his code editor series. This time he's figured out how to add third party dependencies to the editor, specifically ACE for syntax highlighting. You can follow along with the latest tutorial here or start at the beginning here. You can also see the live deployed version here.
Dirk's final app was an image gallery where you can upload images and then create a web app to display them in a pleasant tiled format. You can find the tutorial here and a version of the app hosted on html here. This also builds on top of his development environment so you can use the new syntax highlighting and multi-file uploading features as you develop.
After getting comfortable with making apps and tutorials, Vincent worked on a simple JSFiddle or Code Pen inspired editor where you enter HTML, CSS, and JavaScript into separate text inputs and render a live preview for quickly sketching up web pages and apps. This is a more barebones alternative to Dirk's editor which handles editing files in a directory whereas this generates single HTML pages. You can play around and make your own page here or follow the tutorial to make your own.
For his last app Vincent made use of his P2Pad app too bootstrap making a small app for aggregating links and publishing them as a page on IPFS. You can view the tutorial to build it yourself or check out the final version here. Since this doesn't require Devtools to build you can even try to build it on an Android phone with Agregore Mobile.
As with the other milestones, keeping stuff small and reducing feature sets has helped keep the apps more focused and made it easier to build them. This time around we also saw the benefits of working on top of existing code which could be copied from past projects or in the case of the editors, used to make new projects with less fuss than devtools. It aslo looks like working on the app code before writing the tutorial has been best for avoiding rewriting the tutorial as you go. Overall we've been getting better at scoping tutorials and apps and finding ways to work with the tools we have available.
From doing these tutorials we've found that we can get a lot done with just a bit of code and Agregore's protocol handlers. We'd love to iterate on this further and focus on the following:
If you want to work on this or fund work like this, get in touch by either joinng our Matrix Channel or sending us an email.
Full Retrospectives: