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by joeguilmette 459 days ago
Yes, SPAs are absolutely horrid. I tried to use HEY Calendar and the iOS app is just so absurdly slow I went back to the native iOS calendar app.

Maybe it speeds up their dev time but a native app should not feel like a (poorly engineered) web app. Every click loads for a second or two and sometimes it hangs for even longer. I grew to dread adding and managing events.

It’s a shame because even though the app made some questionable design choices, it was in general a breath of fresh air in terms of UI.

I’d like to hope that they’ll fix it, but I know they won’t.

1 comments

When did you try hey calendar? I've never used anything from hey, but saw a lot of griping about its performance, and eventually saw that they apparently addressed the primary issues.
I used it from launch to… last week? I still have some events on there but I’m done.
I was recently tasked with building a PWA to escape the play stores. A vitally important feature was notifications for the messaging system.

Hours of research trying to figure out how to deliver a notification through the PWA, even if the application was closed. Eventually I thought it wasn't going to be possible. But I remembered the HEY products were PWAs, and they had an email product. Surely that has the notification feature I'm trying to replicate? It's a paid service.

... no, I couldn't get their notifications to work, even though I enabled all of the proper settings. Crazy.

However, when I was about to give up and abandon the entire project, I had one of those moments, and got it to work.

Did you end up getting notifications working with your PWA? That's something I've worried about
> However, when I was about to give up and abandon the entire project, I had one of those moments, and got it to work.

Yes. So much relief. Although it was a bit more difficult than I thought it would be.

What was the trick?