Macropoiesis can now be installed on a phone home screen four times over — the Tribune, Live, My Stocks and Portfolios each install as their own app, opening straight to themselves.
Macropoiesis has been installable as an app for a while. Add it to your home screen from Chrome on Android or Safari on iPhone, and it opens full-screen, without browser chrome, like any other app.
It also had an irritating flaw: whichever page you installed it from, the icon always opened the start page.
Install from the Tribune, get the dashboard. Install from your portfolios, get the dashboard. The install worked; it just refused to remember where you started.
Why that happened
This turns out not to be a bug so much as the shape of the format.
When a browser installs a web app, it reads a manifest — a small file describing the app's name, icon, colors, and the single address it opens at. That address is one field. One manifest, one destination.
The site had exactly one manifest, and it pointed at the root. So there was precisely one installable app, and it opened the root, no matter where you triggered the install from. There was no configuration to get wrong; there was only ever one answer available.
The fix is to stop having one manifest.
Four apps instead of one
Four pages now ship their own manifest, each with its own name, its own icon and its own destination:
- Tribune — opens the Tribune front page
- Live — opens live holdings
- My Stocks — opens My Stocks
- Portfolios — opens your portfolios
Install from any of those pages and you get that app. Install from anywhere else and you get Macropoiesis proper, which opens the start page exactly as before. They coexist: putting the Tribune on your home screen does not replace the main app, and you can have all five side by side if you want them.
Each has a distinct icon — the same black tile and rounded ring, in a different color, with different letters — so a screen full of them is still readable. That mattered more than it sounds. Four identical icons would have been worse than the problem being solved.
They are still one website underneath. Open the Tribune app, tap through to a stock page, and you stay inside the app window rather than being thrown into a browser tab. The apps are separate front doors, not separate buildings.
Getting them
Android, Chrome: open the page, then the browser menu, then "Install app". Chrome sometimes offers it in the address bar too.
iPhone, Safari: open the page, tap Share, then "Add to Home Screen". iOS never prompts you for this — it has never had an install prompt, and there is no way for a site to trigger one. You have to know the gesture.
One caveat worth flagging: if you already installed Macropoiesis, you will need to reinstall. Browsers identify an installed app by an internal identifier fixed at install time, so an existing icon keeps its old behaviour and keeps opening the start page. Remove it and install again from the page you actually want. That is a one-time inconvenience, and I would rather say so plainly than let you conclude the fix didn't work.
Also new
The Blog now has a type filter. Posts come in a few flavours — research papers, longer articles, interactive pages, and now short notes like this one — and the row of pills above the feed narrows the list to one kind. This post is the first thing filed under News.
Which is a fitting first entry, since the whole point of the category is announcements like this one: small, concrete, "here is what changed and how to use it". The longer arguments stay in Articles.