Back in the days of dial-up BBSs and Internet via a real modem, speed and availability constraints led to apps that work well offline.
Now that most people have unlimited broadband, offline tools have become rare. Now we are trapped in an infrastructure that constrains us to having internet at all times which is then reinforced by the Tyranny of Convenience.
So when someone makes the point “boycott Time Warner/Spectrum because they support right-wing politics and assault privacy”, ppl are helpless.. unable to stomach the idea of being offline. It’s like no one has the constitution to say “fuck this shit”.
The web has become such garbage that I am happy to be offline. Shitty ISPs don’t get a dime from me. No more paying for something that is infested with surveillance advertising, CAPTCHA, and garbage. I’m content to periodically login from public hotspots.
But not a single lemmy client for offline use.. to sync when plugged in and then read and compose replies later. This would give a better workflow even if always online because you would have a local copy (useful when servers bail out out of the pure fucking blue).
The hecklers will say “what are you waiting for.. write it yourself!” As if 1 person can recreate a whole infrastructure (lemmy, kbin, mastodon, xmpp, scraper bots, etc). The heart of the issue is it’s a paradigm that’s being overlooked. If you are going to create an app for whatever reason, why not design it at the ground level to work offline and headless? Of course it would also work online and a GUI can be a separate module. But the reverse is not true.. design an app to expect always-available internet and you have something that cannot easily adapt to an offline workflow.
most of my work is done with offline tools; i, too, hate online ones. is there a specific market or set of tools where you are running into this issue? i love my offline tools (both the ones i made and thise made by others)
I have nothing for these use cases, off the top of my head:
depending on your area, more and more transit organizations are publishing their routes using General Transit Feed Spec (GTFS). since the routes and schedules don't change often (a few times a year at most) you can grab the archive and do your route planning offline. Im not sure about any apps that do long distance multimodal planning, or airlines that publish those datasets, but my homeassistant instance shows me next scheduled times for nearby bus and metro stops completely offline using the dataset. there are tools for completely offline transit routing, too.