Happy Tuesday! Tomorrow I fly out to Portland to co-host XOXO and we’re sponsoring its second Art + Code showcase - both lineups are so good I’m getting a bit overwhelmed lol. You can now see why this month’s Glitch Community Code Jam prompt is “just draw” - which, by the way, there’s still plenty of time to participate! ALSO, here are some links:
~ventana is a simple utility that will ask you for a URL and will show you what it looks like in different viewports - easier than opening the same site in multiple windows imho.
@wh0’s game ~subdue-them sent some of my Mastodon followers into a spiral lol. A+++ great game with emoji and math.
If you read the latest Glitch monthly newsletter…first off, thank you, I work hard on them! Second, you’ll know that I’m going to be leaving Fastly in a couple of weeks. This isn’t goodbye to the community and the forum, though, but hello to some rest and joining you in cheering on the Glitch team from the other side of the screen!
Anyway…what are you working on, what are you enjoying, how are you spending the last few weeks of summer, what should the September Code Jam prompt be??? Sound off below, and I’ll see you on glitch.com
IMO Glitch should do the same and make a /replit page that lets people import their projects to Glitch. (this could come across as petty lol)
We don’t have any insight on why they did that but it seems part of a larger change they’re going through which also resulted in layoffs.
But our absolute top priority is being a place coders can depend on – we will try our absolute best to never let you down.
Because many people are asking us, as co-founders & CEO I want to make a promise to you that we will never block pinging services or make any abrupt changes that will break your apps.
EDIT: If Glitch upgrades NodeJS and a few other programming languages on containers in time, it could be a great incentive for Replit users to migrate.
On a related note, I am interested in hearing about how it’s difficult to maintain a live coding platform and why Repl.it is doing what they are doing right now.
They seem to think they were taking a loss from people hosting websites for free since they didn’t really have a limit like glitch does with the hours per month thing. Like they didn’t seem to realize why glitch banned pinging services in the first place.
As a result, they seem to think people went there for the hosting, and now they’re all in on trying to become a hosting service when they aren’t. People went there for the community, if they just cracked down on pinging services super hard relatively no one would have really cared.
But glitch can’t really cash in on this opportunity much unless they upgrade their editor to not suck. Even though replit is trash now, they still made the best decisions when they chose Monaco and Nix.
Even in this state, if glitch had actual community features beyond a support forum many probably don’t even know exists they would blow replit out of the water.
I noticed your post about Glitch moving over to Monaco in a different thread, and the reason why they haven’t done that is because of a very simple reason: Monaco doesn’t have mobile support.
From Monaco’s official website,
The Monaco editor is not supported in mobile browsers or mobile web frameworks.
This might seem insignificant but there’s a sizeable yet small portion of the userbase that uses mobile devices to edit on Glitch, specifically Android. I’d prefer Glitch keep it that way because it helps to keep the site accessible.
While I agree that the user experience on mobile can be quite weird and unfriendly at times, being able to access and theoretically do anything on Glitch from a mobile device is better than having no access at all to the editor. We’ve seen countless people on this forum use Glitch on mobile to edit their projects just like you would on the web, and it’s important to NOT deny them that chance at making a cool app on this platform.
From personal experience, I’ve had to use the editing on mobile a few times when my laptop was sent for repairs or I was simply travelling. I think most of your UX worries disappear when you use any keyboard apart from the stock Google one. It’s a bit annoying at first but then you kinda get used to it.
P. S. If I’m not mistaken, @Yonle used to use Glitch on mobile and still do amazing stuff (iirc he “graduated” to tmux lol)
replit uses Monaco on web and Ace for mobile, it shouldn’t be impossible for glitch to do the same. I would have shoehorned it in myself with the tampermonkey script I’m working on but the content security policy was too strict to get it to load.
While I appreciate Replit’s sentiment to provide an experience for both sides, that is unnecessary overhead for the editor.
From Replit’s own blog post:
[Monaco] added a whopping 5 megabytes (uncompressed) to our workspace bundle, and that’s not something we take lightly.
That would mean different plugins and ecosystems, and afaik CodeMirror’s API is directly ingrained into Glitch’s interface (for example the application object). That’s also double the maintenance while also trying to keep the two editors from clashing. What about the technical difficulties when a mobile user on Ace and a web user on CodeMirror decides to collaborate? Then there’s also the general reputation of Ace being an old and stagnant project, whereas CodeMirror is fresh with updates and v6 slowly being the norm.
It’s not. But remember, the whole reason we’re having this discussion is because a platform that uses two editors is raising prices and losing users - so is it worth it?
That does sound like a big reason not to switch. I suppose it makes a lot of sense now, but I hope they at least give us some intellisense. This is going to be one of the things I’m going to have to do myself if they want to remain an editor that’s barely better than notepad++.
they did! and it was rather controversial, as this document made by the replit community states
I already said this previously but just to highlight what Replit says in the above blog post:
This unfortunately meant that we had to write many of our features twice since Monaco and Ace’s APIs were incompatible. Worse still, this often led to us simply not porting those features over, which contributed to the already inconsistent experience across desktop and mobile.
