Scirra_Tom

My brother (and co-founder) actually develops the product with 2 other full time engineers, I'm not involved in the product development directly.

It was all built from the ground up though. I think we were well ahead of the curve when it was started to be developed 3-4 years ago.

Mentioned in another comment yesterday that we decided against using third party UI because we were worried about bloat, third party dependencies and general responsiveness. Whole app is usable in ~1mb of network load (less than lots of big-corp homepages) and we get comments from users saying after using it for a while they forget they are in the browser which is great and a strong indicator we've hit the mark.

If we were to start again today, we'd still roll our own UI.

My brothers blog is very good and often technical and goes into a lot of interesting web tech stuff relating to Construct 3 and PWA's: https://www.construct.net/en/blogs/ashleys-blog-2?orderID=1

There are a whole raft of benefits of PWA's, probably too many to list especially coming from our native predecessor Construct 2. Auto updating users to latest versions, no download/installation which helps significantly with converting users into just trying the product, faster load times than our native Windows predecessor, easier distribution etc etc.

Cross platform support is an incredible competitive advantage in some markets such as education where Chromebooks are common and competition is sparse/non-existent. It even runs on Raspberry Pi's and we're confident we're future proofed for new devices.

Making your PWA fully functional online is tricky but doable and I believe particular care needs to be taken here from the beginning. Retroactively implementing offline support would be difficult.

It's also important to not get too fancy and building it for offline use helps you avoid these traps. We've seen some PWA's record every user interaction within the PWA which appears to be the basis of some features such as undo - this brings in a huge raft of complexities.

A few shortcomings, but the gaps are being bridged slowly but surely. For example copying images to clipboard: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=150835

Installing as app works great for our PWA: https://editor.construct.net/

> Has anyone built PWAs, and if so, why? Do they work cross-platform/mobile well?

Works cross platform great. Construct 3 is a sophisticated productivity app, although it works on mobile devices it's not the ideal environment to get lots of stuff done with it.

Coming from a Windows native app, main advantage in developing a PWA is that it allows easy cross platform support (Chromebooks especially good for educational markets) and much more agility in developing compared to say a native app.

Yes, no plans to do anything with it for now

If encrypted emails are stored on Helms cloud, why do we need hardware? Isn't a software solution possible where the user holds the encryption keys?

And secondly, if residential internet cuts off - would I lose emails sent to me?

We made our own: https://editor.construct.net/#open=kiwi-story

Responsive (in terms of interaction with components) and lightweightedness were our top priorities when we started developing (~3 years ago) and no third party solutions seemed to fit the bill back then. Always a fear as well of reliance on third parties for such an important part of the product - is a very large technical risk for the entire business.

We're pleased with the results, our entire app is smaller than the Apple homepage (usable after ~1MB of network transfer) and often starts up faster than our C++ native Windows predecessor. Bloating third party solutions could add significant %'s onto the download size - the example HN React Clone is a comparible size to our product: http://www.hnclone.win/

There was a lot of resistance from users initially when we announced the future of our product would be in the browser and not the native desktop app they were currently using, but we do get emails from users saying after using it for a while they forget they are working in the browser which is amazing.

If we started developing today, I think we'd still roll our own.

A password not in a common password list should probably be another imo.

Your site looks great, we don't have EV on Construct.net because it's just to laborious. Will be ordering soon from you.

What aspect of it is not high performance?

Is picking a few cases then concluding it's Google's propensity perhaps a bit hyperbolic?

Making a website secure is such a broad question it can't really be answered comprehensively in a question like that. A better starting point is "how do I protect my application from threat x"

GameMaker has been around since 1999 - if the engine is capable producing a hit game is simply a matter of time. The more time the engine has been around the more likely there will be hit games made in it.

Yep me too! The amount of work that goes into something like this is quite frankly astonishing.

Our whole product is based around "visual scripting" and we think we've nailed it: https://www.construct.net

You can load it in your browser to try at: https://editor.construct.net

Tens of thousands of active users and feedback over the years has been extremely positive on this aspect of our product.

I'd be curious on your thoughts on it coming from a slightly pessimistic starting point :)

> It seems the pressure is comming from policy makers, not the house owners.

I think you'll find that most people in society would support the motion to attempt to reduce extremism and hate speech. It's not a controversial issue nor do I in any way feel it's trampling on any rights I have.

I'm afraid allowing terrorists a free platform to preach will influence people and normalise what they are doing and be a detriment to wider society.

I disagree that everyone should have a platform to say anything. Allowing hatred and violence can normalise it.

Also, if someone got on a soapbox outside your house and starting preaching violence I don't think you'd be celebrating the exercising of their rights - you'd probably call the police.

So you're speaking out for the terrorists? I'm struggling to see the point of that quote.

You need to weigh up your perceived benefits of blogging against lost progress of other aspects of your business.

In the early stage, focus should be on generating money so you become self sustainable. If blogging is part of that strategy, so be it. But blogging for bloggings sake isn't probably a good spend of your time.

However, the relationship between doing something here = an equal loss somewhere else is rarely true - so if it's something you enjoy doing as something different to your normal routine then why not.

We've written a fair few blog posts in the past and always focused on keeping them high quality and is has paid off in some ways - I would say though that writing a good quality blog post easily can take 1 full days work. If you're looking to outsource it, you're doing it wrong.

Probably smaller file size and will look better on hi dpi displays?

Thanks, yes am now!

Mine was recently - worked on our new website for about a year. Then we took the decision to make it scalable. Tried to retro fit scalability in 4-6 weeks before giving up (ouch).

Took the decision to start from a blank canvas around last September, and up until February I only recall having several days off (Christmas, NYE etc). Worked in the day, the evenings and weekends. Impending sense of doom only seemed to subside when I made progress - this feedback loop kept me hooked and driving forwards.

Launched the site (https://www.construct.net) a couple of months later, but it burnt me out. Had to take a fairly significant amount of time off to switch off. I was waking up in the night with a horrible twisting in my chest and random bursts of adrenaline. Not healthy!

The site has been up and running and selling now for months really well, so I am proud and relieved.

Benefits:

* Learnt how to make a scalable site

* Re-writes are always significantly better written

* Learnt a LOT

Downsides:

* My health!

Also, you can't retrofit scalability which is a lesson I learnt the hard way. Seems obvious but I had a years work at stake so had to give it a try and having the guts to scrap everything and start again was incredibly painful but has worked out well long term. Feels very comparable to learning to backup.

When I look back at those several months - I honestly remember very little of it. As our startup has grown we've also learnt than I'm now becoming a significant bottleneck as my bandwidth isn't unlimited and it's a huge relief that we're now taking steps to address this.

I'm also not someone who can easily ask for help and leave it until it's too much to handle. This was a big contributing factor.

Not a "spectacular" burn out story but I teetered very close on the edge of something quite negative - I'm not exactly sure what but I'm glad I avoided it.

Been using it for years, really good and well written! Author very responsive with bugs as well.

1/3 adults with a criminal record in a developed country seems absolutely insane to me.

Edit: Well I need to get off my horse because it seems to be similar here in the UK as well: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2002/apr/14/workandcareers...

Isn't the server giving you permission to view the data? Not give?

EG, if it returns an image - it doesn't imply I can use the image anywhere I want.

Construct 3 - Game editor in the browser:

https://www.construct.net

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13984951

Subscribers increasing slowly but steadily. ShowHN didn't lead to any direct sales as far as our reporting shows but doing a "ShowHN" is something of an internal milestone for us and the comments have been interesting a good motivational boost. Hopefully have more to Show HN in the future!

I think Google Webmaster tools report some XSS vulnerabilities. I'm not suggesting their detection is in any way as sophisticated as your solution - but do you see internet search giants offering and improving this sort of service as threat to you in the long term?

Congratulations on the launch though, don't think this product is targeted towards us though so probably wont get a chance to try it but love the objective.

This looks really cool! One comment, in this picture: https://camo.githubusercontent.com/16434461a69346de4ee07b950...

The left and right side of the rectangle are correctly bent around the shape of the globe. However, the top and bottom sides of the rectangle are not. Is this intention (or am I being stupid?)

Where did you get the IP DB from? My understanding is most you can't resell access to?

The only time purple testes are not a cause for concern perhaps

I would think it would be better to keep the time stamp in a separate column. In essence you're duplicating the time stamp across FKs which is space wasteful - and a little abstract as one field is holding multiple data.