Aussie living in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Coding since 1998.
.NET Foundation member. C# fan
https://d.sb/
Mastodon: @dan@d.sb

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • not dependent on the server

    It doesn’t have to be - a developer could also provide a HTML file that the user can download and open locally.

    And to be honest, if someone had to build a user-friendly cross-platform GUI app for connecting to some sort of serial device, they’d probably just end up using web technologies (Electron or Tauri) anyways. May as well avoid the extra overhead of Electron.



  • IMO it’s fine since you need to explicitly grant permission for the site to use it, and also explicitly choose a device to allow it to communicate with. You can also configure your browser to always reject requests to use the API, if you never want to use it.

    WebSerial is useful for the developer as they can build their webapp once and it’ll work consistently across platforms, and it’s useful for the user since the same interface will work across all OSes.

    I prefer it over the other common approach for communicating with serial devices, which is often to only make a Windows app and to have some convoluted setup process involving sketchy-looking drivers, which then breaks when you have different devices that require different versions of the flashing software or drivers.












  • dan@upvote.autoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlWhy NFC on phones?
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    4 days ago

    Australia has been using tap to pay for around 15 years now, whereas QR codes weren’t in widespread use in the country until COVID. There’s no reason to switch from NFC to QR given practically every bank’s app natively supports NFC payments now (no need to use a third-party wallet if you don’t want to)

    The US is a different story… It took a looooong time for NFC payments to be adopted. I’m an Aussie living in the USA, and some of the US banks I use didn’t support contactless payments until a few years ago!


  • dan@upvote.autoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlWhy NFC on phones?
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    4 days ago

    My car uses UWB (BMW Digital Key Plus) to automatically unlock when I’m walking towards it, once I’m pretty close. Maybe 1 meter (3 feet) from the car, in any direction. It has NFC as a fallback too - if the UWB thing fails for some reason, I can tap the phone to the door to unlock it too.