openwhatsapp VS Isotope

My grandmother's primary method of communication is a cheap Android tablet. It unfortunately includes a preinstalled SMS app that upsells a VoIP SMS service. My grandmother gets extremely frustrated by accidently clicking the message icon and opening an upsell page. There's no way to uninstall the VoIP app.

So instead of giving up and buying a new tablet or paying for an unnecessary service, I hacked together a way to open WhatsApp instead.

https://github.com/Kiran-Rao/openwhatsapp

I had access to a Windows server VM at a previous job that was commissioned for a piece of work. The actual work was then stopped, but the IT folks never decommissioned the VM so I had a nice little server on the local network to play around with. It didn't have Internet access so I was somewhat limited in what I could do with it.

I ended up building a hacky internal IIS/PHP web app (I guess these days one would call it an SPA) that hooked into the company's Active Directory that showed a nice little page of people in our "business unit", with their names, pictures, employee grade (analyst/consultant/manager etc.) and subteam -- basically any bit of info I could get from a user's Active Directory profile.

It used Datatables (https://datatables.net/) for a simple text-based table view and Isotope (https://isotope.metafizzy.co/) for a card-based grid view that you could quickly toggle between.

I called it the "Book of Faces" and announced it to my team at a team social event, and it took off massively beause it was way more performant, simpler, and just much less painful to use than using the clunky corporate intranet app to check user profiles.

Word spread outside of my team and I started getting requests from various other teams to set up similar pages for them as well, which I was only too happy to oblige. This spurred me on to refactor it to make it as simple as possible to set up new team pages.

This silly thing boosted my profile a ridiculous amount within the company, just because I'd left a small footer "emailto" link that people could use to get in touch with suggestions/bugs.

I maintained it as a side project and surreptitious internal app for about 6 years until I left the org, after which I handed it over to someone else. Last I heard though, internal IT finally caught wind of it, and in what I suppose is a "progressive for its kind" response, spoke to the users of the various pages and built a corporate-ised version of the same thing.

A decade-plus of working in tech and data, and that IIS-PHP-JS monstrosity is still one of the bits of work I'm most proud of!

Thanks, we will fix if wrong. Tho...

It may be too late!

Other products in this: Qt - https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/licensing.html, Isotope - https://github.com/metafizzy/isotope#license

What do you suggest?

I want other elements to animate like this example when a specific element become display none https://isotope.metafizzy.co/

https://github.com/metafizzy/isotope

Does the commercial license use a different repo?

If you want to display all the listings, then drill down results with filters, you could accomplish something like this using Isotope.

I was also a big fan of isotope library back in the day

Not easily. I code it using isotope https://isotope.metafizzy.co or custom JS. You’ll need to be comfortable with editing the product loop.

Firstly, thank you so much for your help. The package is https://isotope.metafizzy.co