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Literally no one wants to work like this. A save dialog every time I press cmd-s? If we shipped local file editing for Notion that worked like this our users wo

by jitl 2y ago

Literally no one wants to work like this. A save dialog every time I press cmd-s? If we shipped local file editing for Notion that worked like this our users would egg our office. For any app outside maybe like an image macro meme generator this sucks. For anything else like for example a notes app, photo library, more serious image editor, PowerPoint, video editor, animation software, anything people spend >1 hour a day in - you want to auto save, and often you want to manage a tree of files in a root folder as a “library” of the users’ data. Electron only exists because browsers are too limited. That’s all electron is anyways, a browser with much better APIs for writing apps then the ones included in Chrome and especially Firefox.

cxr 2y ago
Geez, you fucking people... An API is not by definition fine-grained control over UI/UX. Browser makers can implement the new file system API with better UX than what they have now. They can also do that with the existing file APIs; there's no contract involving the existing APIs that says things have to work the way they do right now. (They could also implement the new APIs in a way that technically works but has just as shitty or worse UX than the existing ones.) If you want good/better UX for file save operations, then lobby for that. A whole new (sprawling, bad) set of APIs for giving websites access to the user's filesystem is an orthogonal matter. You're conflating two separate things.
- jitl 2y ago
  I do not want better UX to read and write a single file. None of the example apps I mentioned work well with R/W to a single file except maybe the image editor example. I want permission to create, read, write, move/rename files and directories within a root directory selected by the user. Anything less is not sufficient for AAA quality local-first apps. I think window.showDirectoryPicker() is fine. I hope Firefox will implement this or a similar API, but I am also okay with launching major features without Firefox support. I have done so before to no discernable adverse effects. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/showDirectoryPicker https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/show...
  - cxr 2y ago
    Nothing I just said is limited to the narrow use case of dealing with single files. If you want improvements for multiple files, then congratulations, you can have that, too! > I want permission to [...] move/rename files [...] Anything less is not sufficient for AAA quality local-first apps. And robbers want to be able to slip their fingers into the wallets of whomever they want. So? Very few apps outside of file managers actually need to be able to move and rename the user's files, and it would be much better if they those that don't would assume they aren't going to be able to. You can call this a prereq for high-quality apps, and I'll maintain my view that apps that refuse to work unless you grant an overbroad set of capabilities that they don't really need are ipso facto low-quality. Besides, if you actually want all this, then you can build an app for remoteStorage.io right now, without needing to know whether the files live on the user's disk or not—and if the user wants the storage area they connect to your app to to be backed by local files, then that's a choice that they can make. Your app doesn't need to be able to discriminate between whether they are or they aren't.
    - jitl 2y ago
      Why are you comparing renaming a file inside a directory picked or created by the user to robbers picking a pocket? It's quite typical to implement "atomic writes" by writing to a temporary adjacent file, and once the write is complete, move it to the actual destination filename, possibly overwriting the existing file. For example when exporting a video in a video editor, you might write it first to "$APPDIR/Trip to Spain.webm.incomplete" and then move it to "$APPDIR/Trip to Span.webm" once the file is valid. I am fine if Firefox or any other user-agent mandates that the user can only grant write access to empty directories in order to protect their users from robbers. I'd still be able to build and organize a library of the user's data there, and they'd still be able to edit files with other native apps without needed to upload or download anything. I think the remotestorage.io suggestion a little odd, since the only way it seems one can expose a local filesystem to remotestorage.io apps would be to ask my users to download, install, run, and secure a native, non-web HTTP server program, or to sign up for a third party hosting provider where the files will be off in a cloud. That does not sound like a "local first" app to me :( I find it ironic that a protocol called "remotestorage" touts that it is offline-first design because it keeps user data in inaccessible user-agent storage until the user goes back online, at which point it writes that data to a remote storage provider. Only once the file is written to a 3rd-party server can the user can download the file back to their filesystem. Wouldn't writing a file to the user's filesystem be a more convenient and simple system?

by jitl 2y ago

cxr 2y ago

Geez, you fucking people... An API is not by definition fine-grained control over UI/UX. Browser makers can implement the new file system API with better UX than what they have now. They can also do that with the existing file APIs; there's no contract involving the existing APIs that says things have to work the way they do right now. (They could also implement the new APIs in a way that technically works but has just as shitty or worse UX than the existing ones.) If you want good/better UX for file save operations, then lobby for that. A whole new (sprawling, bad) set of APIs for giving websites access to the user's filesystem is an orthogonal matter. You're conflating two separate things.

jitl 2y ago
I do not want better UX to read and write a single file. None of the example apps I mentioned work well with R/W to a single file except maybe the image editor example. I want permission to create, read, write, move/rename files and directories within a root directory selected by the user. Anything less is not sufficient for AAA quality local-first apps. I think window.showDirectoryPicker() is fine. I hope Firefox will implement this or a similar API, but I am also okay with launching major features without Firefox support. I have done so before to no discernable adverse effects. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/showDirectoryPicker https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/show...
- cxr 2y ago
  Nothing I just said is limited to the narrow use case of dealing with single files. If you want improvements for multiple files, then congratulations, you can have that, too! > I want permission to [...] move/rename files [...] Anything less is not sufficient for AAA quality local-first apps. And robbers want to be able to slip their fingers into the wallets of whomever they want. So? Very few apps outside of file managers actually need to be able to move and rename the user's files, and it would be much better if they those that don't would assume they aren't going to be able to. You can call this a prereq for high-quality apps, and I'll maintain my view that apps that refuse to work unless you grant an overbroad set of capabilities that they don't really need are ipso facto low-quality. Besides, if you actually want all this, then you can build an app for remoteStorage.io right now, without needing to know whether the files live on the user's disk or not—and if the user wants the storage area they connect to your app to to be backed by local files, then that's a choice that they can make. Your app doesn't need to be able to discriminate between whether they are or they aren't.
  - jitl 2y ago
    Why are you comparing renaming a file inside a directory picked or created by the user to robbers picking a pocket? It's quite typical to implement "atomic writes" by writing to a temporary adjacent file, and once the write is complete, move it to the actual destination filename, possibly overwriting the existing file. For example when exporting a video in a video editor, you might write it first to "$APPDIR/Trip to Spain.webm.incomplete" and then move it to "$APPDIR/Trip to Span.webm" once the file is valid. I am fine if Firefox or any other user-agent mandates that the user can only grant write access to empty directories in order to protect their users from robbers. I'd still be able to build and organize a library of the user's data there, and they'd still be able to edit files with other native apps without needed to upload or download anything. I think the remotestorage.io suggestion a little odd, since the only way it seems one can expose a local filesystem to remotestorage.io apps would be to ask my users to download, install, run, and secure a native, non-web HTTP server program, or to sign up for a third party hosting provider where the files will be off in a cloud. That does not sound like a "local first" app to me :( I find it ironic that a protocol called "remotestorage" touts that it is offline-first design because it keeps user data in inaccessible user-agent storage until the user goes back online, at which point it writes that data to a remote storage provider. Only once the file is written to a 3rd-party server can the user can download the file back to their filesystem. Wouldn't writing a file to the user's filesystem be a more convenient and simple system?