Zenbu Devlog #4

I have a weird desire, I really want to start making an app with some models on desktop, and then instantly start taking over on my phone and editing the app for a mobile view

Evan Bacon demo’d on twitter an app he made that’s almost exactly what I want:

https://x.com/Baconbrix/status/1904548835143409948

Bolt, by stackblitz, also has a related feature where you can make an expo app, scan a qr code, and then you get the expo app on your phone by using expo go.

I think we can make this a bit cooler with zenbu

Currently, I have a naive implementation of mobile emulation in the desktop website, so you can pull up a split screen view with what your app will look like on mobile

Which is pretty cool, but I want to run it on my actual phone and see how the app feels.

It would be cool if I can just pull up a qr code, scan it, and then get the app on my phone. You wouldn’t have to wait for the website to build, or deploy. You scan the qr code, and in less than one second you have the development build running right in your mobile browser.

Once its on my phone, I will probably find something I want to change.

I don’t want to go back to my computer to ask for the change. Like Evan Bacon’s video, I want to just edit the app from my phone itself

I also want all the tools/extensions zenbu has on mobile. Remember, a goal of zenbu is to allow you to express what you want to the model with more than just text

Working backwards from the ideal implementation, I will need to solve a few problems:

1. how do I get the development website on my phone
2. how do I make sure hot reloading still works no matter the framework used
3. how can I change the website from my phone
4. how do I handle state sync between mobile and desktop as changes are made to each
5. how can I do this exclusively peer to peer, I don’t want users to ever have to send code to a server I host

I could use a tool like tailscale, or ngrok, but zenbu is a free service, and I don’t really need all the complexity that comes with those products.

Reasoning from first principles, if I just wanted to get html from a computer I owned to a mobile phone, I could just expose a serv

Read More