PWA/add to Home Screen support

Having Liminal easily accessible via the Home Screen would be great for keeping up with things. Right now the add to Home Screen experience is suboptimal; I always have to click “open liminal” from the landing page

This has been bugging me too, actually.

My thinking is, if you are logged in and hit the root, you skip the landing page and get redirected either to the inbox, or maybe ideally whatever view you hit last. Does that sound right to you?

Yep!

Ok, just rolled this out. This feature is only enabled for logged in users right now, but I may add it for guests in the future. Let me know if it feels right!

Feels right, thanks so much!!

I wish it would just redirect to https://liminal.forum/account/inbox

I’m finding it going to the last visited item really confusing. I’ve closed my tab and I’m heading back to liminal, so I go to liminal.forum as a new session. I’m really most interested in seeing if something new has happened in threads/spaces I’m in.

Thanks for the feedback! Hmm, I’m wondering what to do here… My sense has been that I want Liminal to feel more like an app than like a website, so remembering your last page/view (like Slack) seemed right to me.

Since implementing it, it’s felt nice to me, but I also get what you’re saying, that’s it’s unexpected and you want to have a standard landing page to start from (kind of like if you opened Gmail and it took you to your last opened email instead of your inbox).

@tcannonfodder I saw your thumbs-up…have you had second thoughts?

Right now, I’m contemplating making this a user setting…but I know that can be a slippery slope. 😇

I can see what you mean. I’ve just tried pinning my Liminal tab in Safari so the session sticks around. I’ll see how it feels that way.

Since implementing it, it’s felt nice to me, but I also get what you’re saying, that’s it’s unexpected and you want to have a standard landing page to start from (kind of like if you opened Gmail and it took you to your last opened email instead of your inbox).

@tcannonfodder I saw your thumbs-up…have you had second thoughts?

I think either way works, but I do prefer it starting at the inbox until there’s a proper PWA setup

Ok, thanks for the feedback! It sounds like I should either update this to redirect only to the inbox, or make it a config option.

The other thing I had started working on, which built on this feature, was remembering the last visited page within each space (again, like Slack does). So when you change spaces, you start out on whatever view you were previously on under that space. Would that bother either of you? Would you always prefer to land on the channels index view when switching spaces?

For some reason the tab pinning didn’t work great, so I undid that almost immediately (think it’s more a Safari thing).

But just visiting today with inbox being the inroad feels way better to me.

The other thing I had started working on, which built on this feature, was remembering the last visited page within each space (again, like Slack does). So when you change spaces, you start out on whatever view you were previously on under that space. Would that bother either of you? Would you always prefer to land on the channels index view when switching spaces?

Maybe I have some old notions of a forum, since I’m more navigating between more old-school document-like things. That slower pace feels like it’s ok to have an extra click in there. It doesn’t feel persistent like Slack’s app feel.

But yeah, I think I prefer that it goes to the index. Not sure if there things that could be different in the UI that’d change the way this feels to me — if it’s important to you that liminal feels more like an app.

Maybe I have some old notions of a forum, since I’m more navigating between more old-school document-like things. That slower pace feels like it’s ok to have an extra click in there. It doesn’t feel persistent like Slack’s app feel.

This! It helps reinforce conversation organization & trimming, rather than the ephemeral stream of chat