I am an intermediate Vietnamese learner who wanted a way to ease into studying native materials without getting too overwhelmed, so I made SynchroTales. It allows you to:

- View parallel texts - Click a word to see its definition - Double-click a word to play the audiobook

My background is mainly UI: most recently Desktop apps using Rust & Iced (an Elm inspired GUI lib). I thought this would be a good opportunity to push web tech a bit and see what the browsers can do.

At this point I can say honestly I think it is a mixed bag: some things are easier targeting WASM (to canvas) vs JS, but there are still some limitations and you miss out on a lot of freebies that the browser provides.

Currently I'm building an editor so people can create their own documents for the app. Despite browsers offering pretty good text editing out-of-the-box, this is somewhere I think working at a lower level will be beneficial, since the documents are fundamentally different from what we usually edit. Time will tell though!

I appreciate any comments or opinions, either on the tech or the app itself.

Thanks, Nick