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Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud

blog.acolyer.org

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Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud

#113
post #56

As far as possible, I'm following a local-first methodology for a recipe search, meal planner, and shopping list application: https://www.reciperadar.com There's a 'collaboration' mode which allows peer-to-peer sharing of a session via CRDTs over IPFS. My partner and I select our meals for the week, and then when one of us is doing the shopping, we can mark ingredients as found -- the other person's view reflects tho…

This is neat. I developed something similar, but specifically for keto recipes:

https://ketohub.io

How are you parsing the ingredients? I went deep into the rabbit hole on that part and ended up spinning off a separate ingredient parsing SaaS:

https://zestfuldata.com

I wrote about the experience last year:

https://mtlynch.io/shipping-too-late/

Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud

#114
post #56

As far as possible, I'm following a local-first methodology for a recipe search, meal planner, and shopping list application: https://www.reciperadar.com There's a 'collaboration' mode which allows peer-to-peer sharing of a session via CRDTs over IPFS. My partner and I select our meals for the week, and then when one of us is doing the shopping, we can mark ingredients as found -- the other person's view reflects tho…

That is a very cool web app. I really like being able to type in several ingredients and get relevant recipes. I have a nutrient tracking oriented cooking web site (cookingspace.com) that I basically haven’t modified in ten years - seeing your site maybe will motivate me to give my own some attention.

Thanks Mark - your philosophies around efficient use of ingredients and enjoying healthy meals match our own very closely. I'm having a read of your blog and will drop you a line via email soon.

Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud

#115
Very cool. Let me add to all of these great examples in the comments. I published this app with focusing on exactly these points just two days ago.

https://stockevents.app/

All tracked stocks stay within the app. You only pull information from the servers and store that information locally for offline use.

Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud

#116
post #56

As far as possible, I'm following a local-first methodology for a recipe search, meal planner, and shopping list application: https://www.reciperadar.com There's a 'collaboration' mode which allows peer-to-peer sharing of a session via CRDTs over IPFS. My partner and I select our meals for the week, and then when one of us is doing the shopping, we can mark ingredients as found -- the other person's view reflects tho…

Very nice work. I like what I see on many levels!

Let me also echo the idea of a "pantry inventory". Getting something like that working (well) would by itself be a very strong feature. Like others, I have been interested in that for a long time.

I even took a stab at it many years ago, to some success, but abandoned it when we hired a nanny who took care of cooking.

I had a dedicated optical scanner attached to the wall plugged in via USB to an Arduino microprocessor. It had a single button and a single RGB LED. Pushing the button would "wakeup" the system and it would resume previous mode. Two modes: check-in and check-out. (Pushing the button again toggles the mode. System reboots by holding the button down for 3 seconds. Auto "sleep" occured after a set inactivity.) The Arduino just sent a POST request via HTTP API upon a successful SKU scan, and flash a red or blue light depending on thr mode. And then a little CRUD interface I could access from my phone.

There are many SKU datasets out there available, and some amount of management of that data (organization, categorization) would be what could really set you apart.

Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud

#117
post #7

It’s strange that Evernote is omitted from the list - it is a great example of local-first app. Their recent-ish history, when the their free tire become limited to only syncing a few devices, illustrates that even if software is fully local, and supports open formats, having the functional cloud matters, a lot.

Evernote is included in one of their “what not to do” images, showing that they can’t handle conflict resolution at all.

But yeah otherwise Evernote is pretty good for a single user.

Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud

#118
post #56

As far as possible, I'm following a local-first methodology for a recipe search, meal planner, and shopping list application: https://www.reciperadar.com There's a 'collaboration' mode which allows peer-to-peer sharing of a session via CRDTs over IPFS. My partner and I select our meals for the week, and then when one of us is doing the shopping, we can mark ingredients as found -- the other person's view reflects tho…

This is neat. I developed something similar, but specifically for keto recipes: https://ketohub.io How are you parsing the ingredients? I went deep into the rabbit hole on that part and ended up spinning off a separate ingredient parsing SaaS: https://zestfuldata.com I wrote about the experience last year: https://mtlynch.io/shipping-too-late/

Awesome, hello mtlynch :)

It's great that you found this post; as it happens I'm using your fork of nytimes/ingredient-phrase-tagger (thanks a lot for updating and containerizing it!) in combination with 'ingreedypy' for ingredient parsing.

How's zestful doing? It looks great and I did consider using it; the quantity of parsing I was doing led me to choose the container version just to keep my own operational costs down (albeit at the loss of any model retraining you've done).

Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud

#119
post #12

I've been trying to document my "local-first" approach to managing photos. I've made it a ways through but am not sure when I'll finish. Posting here since it is relevant. A Pragmatic Photo Archiving Solution: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JzqT-DJFlS2e8ZC00HrsQITq... It's the culmination of software I've written [1] + a workflow that's resulted from it [2, 3, 4, 5]. [1] Elodie - https://github.com/jmathai/elodi…

Just read through your google doc, interesting! But what about additional family members, with their own cameras, and no interest in any clever workflow activities :) I'm currently using Google Photos as my main service, and it's working good enough for now: each family member has the Google Photos app which uploads pics automatically, to their own account. We all share our Google Photos with each other. This way I (as main curator) have access to everyone's pics, without anyone having to do anything. Google lets you store the original size pics, so that is great (not like iCloud that resizes all pics!). Google also adds face recognition, which is very practical, and also provides a good interface for everyone to view the pictures. Regarding safekeeping: I use the Google Drive interface to backup all my photos to my local linux storage (combination of rsync and https://github.com/astrada/google-drive-ocamlfuse to mount Google Drive). This way I always have all original photos locally. Finally I backup everything offsite using BackBlaze.

All this relies heavily on Google Photos, but I have my own local backup of all original files. So if I need to change service, it should just be a one-time effort to migrate.

Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud

#120
post #56

As far as possible, I'm following a local-first methodology for a recipe search, meal planner, and shopping list application: https://www.reciperadar.com There's a 'collaboration' mode which allows peer-to-peer sharing of a session via CRDTs over IPFS. My partner and I select our meals for the week, and then when one of us is doing the shopping, we can mark ingredients as found -- the other person's view reflects tho…

Very nice work. I like what I see on many levels! Let me also echo the idea of a "pantry inventory". Getting something like that working (well) would by itself be a very strong feature. Like others, I have been interested in that for a long time. I even took a stab at it many years ago, to some success, but abandoned it when we hired a nanny who took care of cooking. I had a dedicated optical scanner attached to the…

Thanks! Having to experience the inventory management problem regularly certainly helps inspire & validate solutions :)

The setup you had sounds extremely cool - did you hit any particular challenges around the SKU data wrangling?

I've added a naive rules-based approach to categorizing products into supermarket departments (bakery, fruit & veg, ...) - it's really barebones at the moment, but already helps planning walking around the shops.

I'm not sure where you're based but your Arduino setup reminds me a bit of supermarket self-service checkouts in the UK - you hold each item up to a scanner and get a little 'beep' confirmation for each one during checkout.

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