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Tiny Apps

tinyapps.org

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Re: Tiny Apps

#101

Post by steanne »

mi100hael wrote: post #88
sundvor wrote: post #19

The apps may be tiny, but the website itself is (also) a breath of fresh air from times past.

I ruefully sort of wish CSS was 100% client side so that all sites would be delivered as plain, unstyled HTML and it would be entirely up to the user how they prefer to see content. Obviously not at all practical, but would make it so much cleaner and easier to read when browsing 90% of sites out there.

the old presto version of opera had an option to default to user css for the whole program instead of the various sites'. don't know if that's still available in the new version.

Re: Tiny Apps

#102

Post by snarf21 »

shliachtx wrote: post #95
snarf21 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

Thank you. It looks like Athena is trying to do just what I described. They even have an incubator for new health related startups[1]. Of course, it is difficult to know from the outside how well they are doing and their trajectory, but I am (foolishly?) optimistic. [1] https://www.athenahealth.com/more-disruption-please/labs

The incubator program is fine but it is a little bit dependent on their cash flow. They sunk too much money into the hospital space and their free cash flow is down and so is their stock price. Johnathan Bush is a free spirit and willing to be disruptive which is their greatest strength. If I lived in Boston still, I would be working there.

Re: Tiny Apps

#103

Post by girvo »

j_s wrote: 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…

I miss GameHippo. Back when I had dial-up and a Pentium 100mhz with 16mb of RAM, it was the best place to download tiny games that would actually run; and it's why I got into programming -- a README with one of the games said a single person wrote it in Pascal, and that gave me the inspiration to learn to program myself!

Re: Tiny Apps

#104

Post by lsh »

voltagex_ wrote: post #35
lsh wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a python and clojure dev, and part of the reason for going in search of tiny apps with source code was to see how they managed it. I know I'm part of the problem too, I like working at a very high level, but I, too, am getting old and grumpy and detest how 16GB ram isn't enough these days. I was actually, partly, looking for a community who built or curated lists of apps with artificial constraints, for example:…

I'd definitely like to talk about this more - I don't have time for any more side projects but it's an interesting idea. "app must not use more than N MB of RAM" is a tricky one - how would you measure usage in all cases?

it's a good point and something I'm still investigating. with the jvm you can set the maximum memory available to the instance.

I once did all the fundamental C and C++ type stuff, writing a memory manager and my own implementations of certain datastructures and algorithms, it doesn't seem unreasonable to write something that would enforce program limits in a transparent way.

Re: Tiny Apps

#105

Post by lsh »

roryisok wrote: post #40
voltagex_ wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd definitely like to talk about this more - I don't have time for any more side projects but it's an interesting idea. "app must not use more than N MB of RAM" is a tricky one - how would you measure usage in all cases?

I think its less about a hard limit and more about comparing to other apps out there that do the same thing. Music players for instance. 1by1 < foobar < VLC < Songbird / Spotify

absolutely. I see a lot of css and js frameworks marketing themselves on how very small they are, both before and after minimization. I guess the first step is to accurately measure what is important.

Re: Tiny Apps

#106

Post by lsh »

fizgig wrote: post #92

I love the minimal and efficient app mindset. Back in the 90s I used this DOS text editor that fit on a single floppy sector (512B). I forget the name, but it was a part of my standard toolkit for many years. These days, I run "evilwm" for my home desktop. That's about as small and efficient as a DE/WM gets anymore, and I love it.

this evilwm? http://www.6809.org.uk/evilwm/

Re: Tiny Apps

#107

Post by miles »

EGreg wrote: post #80
miles wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha! Thanks so much for the kind shout-out, j_s - what a memory you have! Glad to see my humble corner of the web is still of some small interest ;-)

How did you know he mentioned you? Is there some sort of @mention bookmarklet/browser extension in HN?

HNWatcher[1] appears to offer something close: "Follow keywords, users, karma, domains on Hacker News".

The first HN notification system I learned of and used was HN Notify[2,3] by Riyad of The Buzz Media[4].

I've been using edavis' hnrss.org[5] of late; it "provides custom, realtime RSS feeds for Hacker News", including for user posts and comments.

A quick search just now turned up dangrossman's HN Replies[6,7] and a few other monitoring options[8].

But in this case, it was indeed steanne's kind email that alerted me to the HN post.

[1] https://www.hnwatcher.com

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20120103200449/http://hnnotify.c...

[3] https://github.com/rkalla/hnnotify

[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20120119135841/http://www.thebuz...

[5] https://edavis.github.io/hnrss/

[6] http://hnreplies.com

[7] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11080539

[8] https://www.google.com/search?q=hacker+news+comment+notifica...

Re: Tiny Apps

#108

Post by miles »

steanne wrote: post #100
EGreg wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you know he mentioned you? Is there some sort of @mention bookmarklet/browser extension in HN?

failing other explanation, i linked the thread when i sent him a couple of additions.

Thank you, steanne - it was indeed your kind email that alerted me to the post!

Re: Tiny Apps

#109

Post by badsectoracula »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #99
badsectoracula wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which version did you use and when? 10 years ago the IDE would crash at you sneezing at it and it wasn't until 7-8 years ago that things became stable. However i cannot remember the last time i saw the IDE crash (and wasn't my own fault with a component i was making that caused it to crash, but even that that is rare). Note that there are a few versions flying around that are unofficial builds, some with addons that…

So, I do most of my work on Mac, so that's what I'm using. It took me forever to figure out how to rebuild it as a 64bit app using Qt (I built the Qt5 version, maybe that's part of my problem?). Anyways, once I did that, it started fine but I ran into several issues where changing properties of Data Access components would crash the IDE. (postgresql-related things in particular). If I find time, maybe I'll submit som…

You are one step ahead of me, i never managed to build the Qt version myself :-P. Although i didn't try much, i rarely use Macs these days and mostly wanted to see if some minor issue i had with the Carbon build would go away with the Qt backend (the Cocoa backend was basically unusable at the time, although i think today it would work ok).

TBH i'm not sure if it would be Qt5 or the data access components as personally i don't use either :-P. I use Lazarus to make tools mainly for game development (and mainly for 3D stuff) so i don't use the database features at all. Also i tend to use the Gtk2 backend on Linux, mostly because it is the default but also because it tends to fit better the minimalistic window managers i am using (mainly window maker).

Re: Tiny Apps

#110

Post by roryisok »

roryisok wrote: post #39
voltagex_ wrote: post #31

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…

The thing about electron is, there's a time and a place for it. VsCode is an excellent use case for electron - a complex cross platform app with a very quick release cycle, a large plugin ecosystem and a requirement for display and processing of a lot of different types of markup. But I've also seen a tray notification app worn in electron. It didn't even have a UI. There's also an sd card formatter, and a "quick" la…

typos - "app worn in electron" = "app written in electron" and "devs who wasn't to release" = "Devs who want to release".
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