I don't know how Signal works but it is possible to send a silent encrypted push notification that the app can decrypt and show as a local notification.
He is my favorite New Classical artist. His actually hired a programmer to control two pianos and has a custom made randomizer. As a Hacker Olafur is the most interesting artist right now.
Another artist who has used a specially-crafted MIDI-controlled piano is Dan Deacon. His stuff is not exactly New Classical, though, it's a bit more frenetic and goofy, but quite good.
We use React Native for our apps and React for desktop - I'd say about 95% of the Android/iOS code is shared and we're able to share a lot of business logic between mobile and web. Having all of the code together in one repo has worked really well for us and some of the most complicated stuff is shared between all platforms.
If you want to share UI across platforms you could potentially use something like https://github.com/lelandrichardson/react-primitives to do that, but we don't and I'm not sure we'd want to because we don't want to use the same design on all platforms.
I find that a useful way to look at this is to compare the time you would spend on that to the growth you would get by spending time elsewhere.
For example if it takes 1 week to add support for JS disabled clients and they are 1% of your target market but you could spend a week on a feature that would likely add 2% growth, it's a pretty easy decision. The exact numbers are sometimes hard to work out, but the thought process can make the decision easier.
I've been thinking about something similar to this - particularly for me in relation to when bands bring out new albums or new TV series come out. I was thinking I'd probably tackle it a vertical at a time and find a source for the information (e.g. last.fm for albums, IMDB for movies/TV series) that can be put to use automatically. I reckon the simplest way to monetize this would be affiliate links in the alerts - the click through is obviously going to be pretty high (people have actively said they're interested in something) but I've never seen affiliates as a great source of revenue.
We've started running our runservers with pythondontwritebytecode=1 - I haven't noticed enough of a performance impact to change it back and it saves us remembering to delete pyc files before deploys.
Definitely not! But we use it for testing locally, during which time we don't write pyc files which means we're less likely to have issues with that when we deploy to production.
The Guardian app (possibly UK only...not sure) redirects directly to the article if you click No and then remembers that you did that and redirects you directly from then on. Definitely the best implementation I've seen but I don't know the details about exactly how they did it.
Most people use ad networks and ad networks generally don't provide a way to get the ads on the server side. That would also be more complicated than sticking an iframe/script tag on the page for the publisher.
If you don't want to use a network, you have to sell the ads direct yourself - which isn't easy.
I am aware that it would be more complicated, but not impossible. I guess for the time being the percentage of blocked ads is still small, but once it gets significant websites and ad providers will take the next step in the arms race
