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Show HN: Figr.app – a multi-user, notepad style calculator (desktop app)

figr.app

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Re: Show HN: Figr.app – a multi-user, notepad style calculator (desktop app)

#31

Post by wahnfrieden »

jklp wrote: post #18
wellpast wrote: post #11

This is great, I love local-first [1] software. Are you using OT or CRDTs for real-time editing? Are you using any specific cross-desktop platform? (Electron?) [1] https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/

> This is great, I love local-first [1] software. Thanks! This was an intentional design decision on the desktop too so I'm glad someone noticed! > Are you using OT or CRDTs for real-time editing? You know this is embarrassing - it's the first time I've heard of those terms and from a quick google I really needed this a few months ago! A lot of the problems described I actually had to battle with and if you try hard…

for CRDT solution, check tiptap + hocuspocus / yjs

Re: Show HN: Figr.app – a multi-user, notepad style calculator (desktop app)

#32

Post by 4silvertooth »

armchairhacker wrote: post #7

I wish there were more apps like this which let you just type text and make/do things. Just make everything a sort of real-time coding. It's often much faster to do stuff with text and keyboard than any fancy GUI. Other examples: sequencediagram.net, SwiftUI and React to some extent, vim directory managers (e.g. some let you rename files just by editing text and delete them just by deleting lines) The only issue is,…

I had been looking for such an application, but than I decided to build one myself that suffice my needs, here is the repo https://github.com/4silvertooth/QwikTape

Re: Show HN: Figr.app – a multi-user, notepad style calculator (desktop app)

#33

Post by webmobdev »

jklp wrote: post #15
webmobdev wrote: post #10

Is it available for download somewhere other than the OS "app stores"?

Ahh yeah not at the moment. I intentionally only released on app stores as I didn't want to complicate my deployment, as well as host binaries / handle auto-updates. Signing is also a real pain and (in the case of Windows) quite expensive, and I'm unsure of the demand at the moment to warrant that. Just out of curiosity, what's the aversion to app stores? I know for paid apps there's a large commission to Apple / Mic…

Privacy mainly. And as a software developer, such app stores are insulting to us because it is used to extort money from us for the "privilege" of developing software for their platform, when they should be the one appreciative of the fact that every new software from us increases the value of their platform. As a user too, I find this very unethical of them as it unnecessarily increases the cost of buying softwares (why should I pay Apple or Microsoft or Google an extra 20 to 50% for buying a software made by you?). I have no qualms in saying that we software developers are fools for letting them take advantage of us and our clients / users.

Re: Show HN: Figr.app – a multi-user, notepad style calculator (desktop app)

#34

Post by jklp »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #31
jklp wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is great, I love local-first [1] software. Thanks! This was an intentional design decision on the desktop too so I'm glad someone noticed! > Are you using OT or CRDTs for real-time editing? You know this is embarrassing - it's the first time I've heard of those terms and from a quick google I really needed this a few months ago! A lot of the problems described I actually had to battle with and if you try hard…

for CRDT solution, check tiptap + hocuspocus / yjs

Thanks will do!

Re: Show HN: Figr.app – a multi-user, notepad style calculator (desktop app)

#35

Post by armchairhacker »

feifan wrote: post #21
armchairhacker wrote: post #7

I wish there were more apps like this which let you just type text and make/do things. Just make everything a sort of real-time coding. It's often much faster to do stuff with text and keyboard than any fancy GUI. Other examples: sequencediagram.net, SwiftUI and React to some extent, vim directory managers (e.g. some let you rename files just by editing text and delete them just by deleting lines) The only issue is,…

The hard thing about plain-text is that you quickly run into domains/problems that are too complicated to easily represent as plain-text. When that happens, you run into problems: the text representation becomes really verbose (e.g. XML) or exhaustingly terse/unergonomic (e.g. LaTeX, IMO), and you can only build anemic tooling.

one solution to this is to make an editor which is almost text but has snippets like inline images, controls, and fancy decorations. e.g. Racket snips, JetBrains MPS

another which is more of a workaround is to make the preview editable. So when the text is hard to understand or manipulate you just edit the preview, and when it’s easier you just input text. i believe this is what SwiftUI does and what people have tried with HTML and React.

of course both of these are exponentially hard. The former means you have to write your own editor and the UI for the widgets and think about a lot of problems (text wrapping? cursor movement?) The latter means you have to write a UI on freely-editable content which is really challenging and then have it sync with the text which also brings up a lot of problems (AST formatting? How fast to update?)

In fact I haven’t yet seen a single good example of either type of editor, maybe SwiftUI is good although i haven’t used it. Many existing ones are buggy with ugly unintuitive GUIs or produce bloated AST

Re: Show HN: Figr.app – a multi-user, notepad style calculator (desktop app)

#36

Post by easygenes »

Ooh. I have used Soulver on iOS for nearly a decade now. Sadly, the developer has pulled it from the App Store for a long time, so I can’t point others to it. For me, Soulver has the ideal UI for a phone screen. The one thing I really feel it is missing is a cross-platform sync. I used the iCloud integration and Mac app, but if I could access my worksheets from Linux and Windows just as easily I would be totally happy.

Figr, ignoring the lack of mobile apps, doesn’t really scratch this itch either though, as I want to self host my sync.

Re: Show HN: Figr.app – a multi-user, notepad style calculator (desktop app)

#37

Post by easygenes »

easygenes wrote: post #36

Ooh. I have used Soulver on iOS for nearly a decade now. Sadly, the developer has pulled it from the App Store for a long time, so I can’t point others to it. For me, Soulver has the ideal UI for a phone screen. The one thing I really feel it is missing is a cross-platform sync. I used the iCloud integration and Mac app, but if I could access my worksheets from Linux and Windows just as easily I would be totally happ…

Thinking about this a bit more, if I wanted to scratch my own itch… there’s a nice VS Code plug-in called Qalc [1] which I could probably build an iOS interface around and use Syncthing/Möbius Sync…

  1: https://github.com/nortakales/vs-code-qalc

Re: Show HN: Figr.app – a multi-user, notepad style calculator (desktop app)

#39

Post by tuxychandru »

jklp wrote: post #12
russianGuy83829 wrote: post #2

How hard would it be to create a Linux version?

I was waiting for this question :) I think it should be quite straight forward but it's more the deployment and maintenance I'm conscious of. Mac and Windows (to an extent) both have app stores which can handle hosting, auto-updates, etc, though for Linux I'd have to build a bit of that myself. That also complicates platform specific dev / testing / deployment, and as this is a side project I'm conscious of time. But…

If the primary concern is the lack of a common packaging format/app store, please consider publishing to https://flathub.org/. It should solve these for you across all distributions.

Testing should also be simpler as most of your dependencies will bundled and testing in one distribution should suffice.

Re: Show HN: Figr.app – a multi-user, notepad style calculator (desktop app)

#40

Post by gman83 »

What language did you use to build this? What about the UI? Also, I tried to login to the application with Google and got "Authorization Error -- Error 403: access_denied -- The developer hasn’t given you access to this app. It’s currently being tested and it hasn’t been verified by Google. If you think you should have access, contact the developer"
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