Sooooo this devlog is mostly comprised of website changes. I have a conference in San Francisco and wanted to polish up the app before publishing. Here are the main changes I made:

13. Random chores and updating the website

I absolutely love shadcn-ui, but so do AI models. In past reviews by stardance raters, as well as family and friends, they pointed out the website looked AI-generated. Hence, I decreased the number of gradients and added basic animations to make the site feel more alive. This was a first for me to implement animations, but the Tailwind docs made it quite simple. I used a specific code-like font instead of the generic fonts I had and tidied up CSS classes. The biggest change was adding a blurred-geometric background for a nicer feel.

14. Redesigning the website completely

I felt it was better to update the website as a whole, so I changed up the user interface. When I tested the app with real users, they complained that they didn’t know how to actually use the app. I changed the hero design to have clearer text and added an SVG-animation component showing how the site actually works. The feature section stayed the same, but there was a highlights grid (inspo https://cider.sh/) to highlight the main features. The FAQ was shortened to my liking, and I pulled some utilities from Tailwind for animations.

In terms of images, I updated the images of the app featured on the website and cleaned up some of the dimensions related to that CSS. The old homepage still lives inside OldHome() but isn’t used anymore.

15. Tidying up the README and build workflows

I edited the README to remove redundant information and make it more developer-focused. I also updated some information regarding GPU builds. For the build workflow, I ensured it would only run if the commit ended in “rebuild”. This ensures unnecessary build minutes are not spent on small changes not requiring a full rebuild.

16. Wake lock API fallback

This app aims to support all devices, but older devices have…funny APIs to say the least. For WebRTC, I implemented the legacy encoded streams API. However, the device would still turn off for seemingly no reason while the video was playing. On older devices, the wake lock API is not supported. However, there’s a unique workaround for this: any video element playing on the webpage will keep the screen from dimming. Hence, I used the NoSleep library to create an off-screen 1-second video element that keeps looping, ensuring the display doesn’t go dark. Some very fun stuff with browsers.

That’s it for this devlog! Mostly minor changes, but the next one will have better SW encoding support among other changes. Stay tuned…