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Scrappy – Make little apps for you and your friends

pontus.granstrom.me

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Re: Scrappy – Make little apps for you and your friends

#4

Post by riffraff »

I am 100% behind the idea of "scriptable components" vs block-based programming for beginners.

I'm on mobile now but I'll try this on desktop ASAP.

But I think one thing missing on the analysis is: people want ease of share and zero cost.

It's surprisingly simple to build a minimal app in some environments but then you get to distribution (app store are a huge gatekeeper) and/or hosting and e.g. my wife or kids won't be bothered to pay 5$/momth for it (and neither will many professional devs).

Re: Scrappy – Make little apps for you and your friends

#5

Post by DougN7 »

riffraff wrote: post #4

I am 100% behind the idea of "scriptable components" vs block-based programming for beginners. I'm on mobile now but I'll try this on desktop ASAP. But I think one thing missing on the analysis is: people want ease of share and zero cost. It's surprisingly simple to build a minimal app in some environments but then you get to distribution (app store are a huge gatekeeper) and/or hosting and e.g. my wife or kids won't…

You could self host with your OS’s web server and a dynamic DNS service pointing to your home computer.

Re: Scrappy – Make little apps for you and your friends

#7

Post by RodgerTheGreat »

CardStock[0] isn’t mentioned in this article, but seems broadly similar in goals and approach to Scrappy. Unlike Scrappy (so far as I can tell) CardStock is open-source and can be run locally.[1]

Decker[2] (which is also open-source) has answers to several of the things outlined on Scrappy’s roadmap, including facilities for representing and manipulating tabular data with its query language and grid widgets and the ability for users to abstract collections of parts into reusable "Contraptions".

[0] https://cardstock.run

[1] https://github.com/benjie-git/CardStock

[2] http://beyondloom.com/decker/index.html

Re: Scrappy – Make little apps for you and your friends

#8

Post by selcuka »

I think "vibe coding" will not replace developers in the short term, but it will be the strongest competition for such simple systems. I asked a few LLMs to make apps like these (plain HTML with embedded JS), and they got it right after a few edits. They are also visually more appealing [1].

[1] https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/bb451732-9559-401a-8000-b...

Re: Scrappy – Make little apps for you and your friends

#9

Post by stevoski »

riffraff wrote: post #4

I am 100% behind the idea of "scriptable components" vs block-based programming for beginners. I'm on mobile now but I'll try this on desktop ASAP. But I think one thing missing on the analysis is: people want ease of share and zero cost. It's surprisingly simple to build a minimal app in some environments but then you get to distribution (app store are a huge gatekeeper) and/or hosting and e.g. my wife or kids won't…

Sadly, free hosting or distribution for fun ideas like this one leads to bad actors abusing the service.
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