2020-12-22

Hotwire: HTML Over the Wire

Basecamp has released their “New Magic” (as DHH has been teasing) and it’s called Hotwire. The idea is to use server-rendered HTML as much as possible, getting fast frontend interaction nearly for free. Turbo is a big part of this, and is the successor to TurboLinks. They still use Stimulus for those cases where you need real interactivity, and they have a new (not-yet-released) project called Strada for hooking up to native apps.

The thing I like about this approach for database-based applications is that it simplifies state management by keeping the state in one place: the server. Once you build a single page app, you need to worry about how to synchronize state between the server and client. There are many ways to deal with this, and Hotwire provides a very simple one.

Update July 5, 2021: The domain name has changed to hotwired.dev (with a d at the end of hotwire), likely because Sam Stephenson owns the domain and doesn’t want to turn it over to his former employer after the issues of the spring.

Camo: use your iPhone as a webcam

I have a Logitech webcam which isn’t terrible, but my iPhone’s camera is far superior. Camo is a Mac app to use your iPhone as a webcam, which seems awesome.

The only downside is that it’s $40 per year. I’m okay with the subscription business model for apps, but that seems steep for an app that likely doesn’t need a lot of updating. That said, you can use this software for 4 years before you match the cost of this webcam.

They have a page about mounting your phone, and they suggest this arm mount, which looks cool.

Show-me webcam is worth a mention, because it’s open source and built on the Raspberry Pi and it looks like you can get some decent lenses for it.

I’ll note that I haven’t, as of this writing, used any of the products above and there are some affiliate links here.