The technology for building web apps is moving faster than ever.
If you go to this site, you’ll see (until I take it down or replace it with something else) a web-based chat app that I built for BL.
(It runs on the desktop — with Chrome and Firefox at least and maybe newer versions of Microsoft Edge, and maybe IE.
It runs on mobile devices: Android, iPhone, tablets.
You can sign in if you have credentials with Google. If I add a couple of lines of code I can add Facebook, Twitter, sign in by Email and other forms of authentication.
It took me ten minutes to build and deploy. Ten minutes! It took longer to write this post!
Of course it was only ten minutes because I cloned an earlier version. That one took me a whole hour! An hour!
But it was based on something that someone at Google had done and open sourced — with a tutorial. But still!
Building collaborative multi-platform apps like this is still out of the reach of most people, but it’s coming in reach fast.
I think this change has implications for what people might be able to do in ther communities — and what we might do for Beyond Labels. It would be fun to have the folks who winter away join us even when not in the area.
Discussion topic what might this mean for us and the world?
(Note: app currently displays only the last 25 messages, so not for real use. But it does store all messages, so I could make it for real if people thought it was useful.)