The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - SSH tips and tricks, retro Apple UIs, iOS Privacy and TikTok, Marta & Tauri vs Electron (News)

Episode Date: August 22, 2022

Carlos Alexandro Becker shared some SSH tips, Sakun Acharige (a Comp Sci student + visual design enthusiast) created System.css, Felix Krause built a browser app that shows the JavaScript commands being executed by iOS app in-app browers, Yan Zhulanow decided to create Marta, and Lőrik Levente did a comparrison between Tauri & Electron using a real world application he’s building called Authme.

test one two test one two test is this thing on what up fake friends sorry Dinesh you will now have one less fake friend I'm just kidding we're real friends don't worry we love you hey this is Adam and this is change law news for the week of Monday, August 22nd, 2022. So Jared is out this week, and that means I get to do the news. But where is Jared? Good question. Thankfully, nothing has gone wrong, and he's probably hitting some golf balls right about now. But while I'm talking about Jared, I just want to say what an awesome job he's done starting this Monday edition of the podcast. Seriously, I'm impressed.

I've been loving it, and I'm a listener. Let's give him a round of applause. Ladies and gentlemen, Pied Piper appears to have just doubled the best Wiseman score ever measured. Doubled it. Pied Piper, ladies and gentlemen. Okay, let's get into the news. First up, Carlos Alexander Becker shared some SSH tips he's learned over the years, including YubiKey integration. You know, I still haven't set up a YubiKey. I need to do that. Yes, I have an SSH key in my house right now. Cool.

Wow. Carlos covers SSHing straight into Tmux, adding an A-list for commonly used hosts. This is something I use every single day. I have a template I use. Making connections last longer by adding a server,alive interval program to the host star record, and YubiKey and GitHub without touching it every time. But he admits this goes against the principles of using a YubiKey. The link is in the show notes.

Next up, Sakun Ekeridge, a comp sci student and visual design enthusiast, created System.CSS. It's a CSS library for building retro, Apple-inspired interfaces, like when Steve was around. Uh, Jobs or Wozniak? System.CSS lets you build interfaces that resemble Apple's System OS, which ran from 1984 to 1991. Design-wise, not much really changed from System 1 to System 6, but this library is based on System 6 as it was the

final monochrome version of macOS. If you're feeling retro, check it out. On to iOS privacy, and this one is quite concerning. Felix Krauss built a browser app that lists the JavaScript commands being executed by the iOS app that's rendering the page. Here's how you use it. First, you open up an app you want to analyze. Then you share the URL in appbrowser.com somewhere inside the app. For example, send a DM to a friend or post the link to your feed. Then tap the link from inside the app to open it inside the in-app browser. Then read the report on the screen. His findings after using this for a bit are quite concerning, especially TikTok. TikTok is subscribing to all keyboard inputs. This includes passwords, credit card information, every tap on the screen, the buttons you tap,

the links you click, all that. For too long, these large tech companies have harvested our data. They have violated our privacy. They have tracked our every move. Yikes. Now let's turn to Mac OS. After trying many different file managers for Mac OS, and then waiting around for a year and a half for someone to make one or for the existing file manager to get better, Jan Zulan and I decided to create Marta. Marta is a native Mac OS app with a minimalist design. It sports a dual-pane UI.

It's customizable and themable. It's native, it's extensible, and it's fast. Giddy up. I haven't tried this yet, but it is onensible and it's fast. Giddy up. I haven't tried this yet, but it is on my list. Okay. Tower versus Electron. I'll bite. This is a comparison from Lorik Levente using a real world application that he's building called OffMe. This comparison focuses on these key points, bundle size, startup time, performance, app backend, rendering your app, security, auto update, and developer experience.

So is Electron being replaced? You guys, it worked. It happened. We did it. It worked? We won. Boss, we did it. Yeah.

Lorik says, quote, "'Yes, Towery is way better, but it still misses a lot. In a couple of years, i'm sure the towery team will catch up to electron the things i'm excited for are dino as a back-end better auto update and ios android support end quote in case you missed it check out episode 497 of the change law we talked to daniel thompson about towery and their journey to the recent 1.0 here's a clip from that episode where we're talking about app sizes for Towery. Towery definitely, I think, is well-positioned because of these very small app sizes that you all produce to change the game once again

and allow better cross-platform apps to be built. The smallest app size that I know of was 450 kilobytes for a functional Hello World macOS app. Granted, the ICNS, the icon file for Mac, if you play it right, the icon is generally the largest piece of your code base. I was going to say, they like to have nice, big icon files.

Yeah, there's your 700, 800 kilobytes right there. And the code that we need to build the app is 300 kilobytes. If you write solid, tight, minified JavaScript and you use SVGs, right. You know, and,

and you do like the awesome parts of rust compression, then you can absolutely get down to two, three megabytes for a small app. For massive apps, okay, sure, there's maybe a bit more JavaScript, and then it's eight or nine megabytes. Again, that's episode 497. Links are in the show notes. That's the news for now.

Stay tuned for our regular edition of The Change Log on Friday when Jared and I talk to Alex McCall about life at sea and building reflect have a great week talk to you then it developed a general solution to discrete log in polynomial time what okay is this a good thing or a bad thing someone tell me how to feel abject terror for you build from there