Adventures in Web Apps

I mentioned in my recent post about venturing back onto Mastodon that I’m using the web interface for my chosen instance in preference to a dedicated app. That got me thinking about my usage of Discord on the Mac and iPhone. On the iPhone, I need notifications as I use Discord to coordinate with the management of a radio station I do shows for, and to let them know if I can’t broadcast for any reason. The Mac app is okay but has been a memory hog in the past, and I keep notifications disabled.

As an experiment, I decided to try using Discord in Safari on the Mac, and it has worked really well! So well, in fact, that I’ve uninstalled the Discord app.

I occasionally use Fastmail in the browser, but that’s usually for specific tasks like tweaking spam settings or calendar subscriptions. For general email management, I use MailMate on the Mac as I value having local copies of my emails.

As a personal rule, my preference is to have my data locally and synched where it makes sense to do so. However, if I do use any third-party external services in the future, I will definitely consider using those in the browser and only installing an app if it’ll improve my productivity.