Local-first is Dead, Long Live Good Apps

We’ve kept up with the people and ideas in the space, ever since the publishing of the eponymous paper. For those interested, we have a list of people/ideas at the end of this post.

What we do believe in

We really just want to make applications that feel good to use across time. We want daily interaction to feel snappy and predictable, and to minimise the long-term uncertainty about the death of the service itself.

No loading spinners

You don’t have to load everything on to the client to make this happen, you can also preload on hover, fetch according to navigation patterns, or split your queries between a cache and the authoritative server a la ZeroSync.

Network is optional

Users should be able to do the 80% of the work that requires a flow state completely offline.

The Long Now

Don’t die, don’t make your users regret trusting you.

We love standards and wish there were more (simple! no PDFs please) file formats that made moving and working with data easier for our users.

Make all the things collaborative

Because why not? Sure, it’s more work but laziness doesn’t make for good products.

Security and privacy from

The future is going to be many things

We’re going to make remote calls to services, and we’re going to want to get apps to feel as polished as possible. This calls for two things: sync engines, and good system design