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Tiny Apps

tinyapps.org

61–70 of 114 posts

Re: Tiny Apps

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad it's easier to write apps than ever before. But it was easy before. If you are willing to forego completely native UIs (which you are when you are using Electron), it's always been easy to make GUI apps with Qt. Drag together an UI in designer, use (py|whatever)uic to generate classes, hook up signals/slots, and you are done. I can only pin it on intellectual laziness of front-end programmers not wanting to…

Is a PyQt app really more lightweight than Electron? To be fair, Qt is a lot trickier than Electron - you've mentioned slots and signals which are not something you'd encounter every day (at least in webdev world). Edit: I also don't buy any argument that relies on "intellectual laziness". There's enough elitism around already.

Yes, much. And if that's too heavy for you, WxWidgets should be even lighter.

Re: Tiny Apps

#62
post #7

I've been using a replacement of network>Proxomitron proxy filter tool called Proxydomo available on github. God bless the guy that reverse engineered the original. [1] https://github.com/amate/Proxydomo

Wow what a throwback..I've been using Fiddler for some quick proxying but it still doesn't compare to Proxomitron

Re: Tiny Apps

#63
You can write all sorts of tiny apps. We need to have 100 people just to tell the other 100 people what process to follow, how to write everything, what it should look like, etc. Plus another 100 people to run the process. Also another 100 people to manage those people. Bonus: the following version in this monster must be complete before the previous version is even live. No tiny for us...

Re: Tiny Apps

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been thinking about this a lot, mainly due to being grumpy about the proliferation of Electron apps and the effect that's having on my available RAM. When I'm not being so grumpy, I'm glad it's easier to write apps than ever before. I think someone on here posited that it's a choice between something written in Electron or not written at all. I think that's fair enough - maybe we just need to make it easier to w…

> And yes, I know as a C# developer sitting on top of hundreds of megabytes of runtime, I'm "part of the problem". This should be a solvable problem, IMO. I mean, C/C++ apps are not inherently tiny - they sit on top of a large runtime too, but one that usually comes with the OS. What makes Python or Lisp apps (in binary form) multi-megabyte by default is that they can't depend on users having the runtime installed, u…

You are deeply confused.

What makes managed/VM based languages big is that those runtimes are general purpose, and therefore have to embark what most people need. A C/C++ app embarks (mostly) only what's necessary.

I can compile a hello world for bare metal, replace puts with a routine that sends the characters to the serial output, add the necessary UART initializations, and the final program will still be a bunch of order of magnitudes smaller that a Python install. The comparison is unfair of course, but it proves one thing: no multimegabyte runtime in C.

Re: Tiny Apps

#66
post #60
post #24

Although it was "removed due to copyright violations"[1] in 2003, TinyWindowsGames.com was a work of art. If you don't mind downloading random binaries you can still grab them via the Internet Archive. I will see if I can create a new screenshot of the playable, tiny thumbnail near the system tray (probably microscopic at today's resolutions). https://web.archive.org/web/20030618002602/http://www.tinywi... [1] Ninten…

Which shows that copyright is a form of censorship.

Well, that's what it was invented for...

Re: Tiny Apps

#68
Tiny, single exe (and an ini for config) Windows programs have a special place in my heart. Perfectly portable, instant and lightweight.

I want to cry when I see simple software like Sticky Notes in Windows 10 using dozens of MB of memory and have a 30+MB install size with minimal functionality.

I don't have a big issue with .NET and Java based apps but I seem to be using more and more Electron based software and while the software isn't bad it sucks that every program comes with its own bloated framework :(

Re: Tiny Apps

#69
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite the back handed compliment! They are one of the better ones but the bar is extremely low.

I wonder why this field hasn't been disrupted yet. It seems ripe for it. Established players. Arcane systems. Poor performance. From what I've heard from employees at Epic their software is something of a nightmare. Is it just something waiting to happen? Is there a company that is already doing this? It could probably be done one independent hospital at a time. Eventually you could get a small network, etc. I unders…

There are companies that are trying. Athena was doing a good job in a lot of respects but then decided they wanted the hospital market and that hasn't gone well. The issue is that switching EMRs has a huge switching cost. You are looking at years just to get the sale. Then there is the time and cost to switch which can easily be 6-24 months depending on size. The biggest problem is that all the health care workers have to relearn a whole new flow and these things are not trivial. Add in that most health care workers are not as tech savvy as you would think.

Additionally, as was mentioned, the health care systems depend on the EMR for all government and compliance reporting. The EMRs also do NOT play nice together so even if you get customers, it is hard to get data out and shared with other systems. It is possible to disrupt this space but you better start with a war chest, start with a very focused niche (say Urologists) and be prepared to slog it out for a decade.

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