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Scrappy – Make little apps for you and your friends

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

#51
post #31

I agree with the title, but not with the article. I expected to see something like how you can make your friends and family lives easier using your skills as a software developer. From time to time I come up with micro-projects that solve very particular issues my friends are facing. Ones that are not easily solved with existing apps on the market. When I see my friends use them, it brings me joy! But! For this I had…

Same thing here, one of my first open source projects was to read a public Google sheet to pull the data, both from the frontend and backend. While Google killed the api that made it possible so I deprecated it, it still holds a precious place in my memories as one of the most collaborative projects I've ever made

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

#52
post #46

"We believe computers should work for people, and dream of a future where computing, like cooking or word processing, is available to everyone." generic... "with live updating — all for free. LLMs ar..." also see a fair few of these long dashes (18x) which is either a tell tail of you've used ChatGPT to generate the text or you've started writing like the AI. I havn't thought about it that hard yet but i don't really…

If you read up on hyphens VS en-dashes VS em-dashes, using em-dashes is actually the correct usage — as a separator — in the case you cited.

I disagree with your conclusion of this being a telltale sign of being AI generated.

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

#53
post #43

You can make an awful lot of useful little tools with an LLM, vanilla JavaScript, GitHub Pages, and the user's own localStorage as a semi-persistence layer. Two 9s and cross-platform to boot. Recently I made a diet checklist [1] that I've been following more or less to the letter 5 days out of the week. I have a little Android button that just opens right up to the web page. I click, click, click, then move on with m…

+1 over this. As someone without a deep technical background, LLMs enabled me to improve my life unimaginably, being able to quickly sketch and develop small features that remove every day annoyance.

examples?

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

#54
An alternative to Scrappy is the free CodeBoot web app (https://codeboot.org), which allows you to create web apps in Python that are fully encapsulated in a URL. No installation is required—neither for the developer nor the user. Below is an example of a math practice app with simple user interaction through dialogs. To create a web app URL, right-click the "play" button and choose the type of link you want to generate.

https://app.codeboot.org/5.3.1/?init=.fbWF0aF9wcmFjdGljZS5we...

For more complex UIs, CodeBoot provides an FFI for accessing the DOM directly from Python code. For example here is a dice throwing app with a button to roll the dice again. The text in the button has translations to multiple languages and will adjust to the browser's default.

https://app.codeboot.org/5.3.1/?init=.fZGljZS5weQ==~XQAAgADq...

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

#55
post #31

I agree with the title, but not with the article. I expected to see something like how you can make your friends and family lives easier using your skills as a software developer. From time to time I come up with micro-projects that solve very particular issues my friends are facing. Ones that are not easily solved with existing apps on the market. When I see my friends use them, it brings me joy! But! For this I had…

[deleted]

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

#56

One of the best things that I did was spending a week making a simple app that can put all my Apple Watch walks on a single big map, then sharing it with my friends after it got published on AppStore. It's been a year since I worked on it, but I still get messages from my friends (and some random people who found it!) how they've walked through an entire city or something. Really rewarding experience, despite having…

Just think about the thousands of useless obstacles and moats you’ve had to navigate and overcome to make that. How many millions have given up at any one of them.

After all that you still control nothing and are vendor locked.

Imagine if you could just AI prompt that up and simply transfer to your open source watches.

What a world that would be.

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

#57
The core vision here is something I can absolutely get on board with, but the execution fundamentally seems to misunderstand why "home-cooked software" doesn't exist.

The target audience problem is immediately apparent: they're building a product for people who can write JavaScript event handlers but somehow can't 'npx create-react-app'. This demographic is approximately twenty-seven people.

More critically, they've confused the problem space, in my opinion. The barrier to personal software isn't the lack of drag-and-drop of JavaScript environments. It's that software, unlike a meal or a home-made sweater, comes with an implicit support contract that lasts forever. When I cook dinner for friends, I'm not on the hook when they're hungry again next Tuesday. When my grandma knits a home-made sweater, she's not expected to keep supporting it in case I want to add a hood.

When the attendance counter has a race condition and the venue goes over capacity, guess who's getting the angry call when the fire marshal shows up for an inspection?

The "redistributing the means of software production" rhetoric rings particularly hollow from what appears to be a proprietary SaaS in the making. You don't democratize software by creating another walled garden. And their claim about "owning your data" while simultaneously offering real-time sync is either technically naive or deliberately misleading. How is the attendee counter example's counter state shared between users, if the data lives in local storage? I don't see how you can have both without server infrastructure that they control.

The actual nearest thing to their vision already exists and has millions of users: Spreadsheets. Non-technical people build complex, business-critical "applications" in spreadsheets every day. No JS required, local-first, and everyone already knows how to use it. But "we made a worse Excel" doesn't sound as revolutionary, I suppose.

The real unsolved problem isn't making it easier to create small apps - I build small tools for myself all the time. It's making them sustainable without creating permanent maintenance burdens. And that is not something you can solve with a new framework or SaaS - it's at it's core, a social issue.

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

#58
post #8

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...

Whats your simple system stack, preferably self hostable? I may choose Vue, need auth, a multiplayer offline DB, static hosting, file hosting and preferably filter rows by users (dont allow me to see others data if I fiddle with the api).

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

#59

You can make an awful lot of useful little tools with an LLM, vanilla JavaScript, GitHub Pages, and the user's own localStorage as a semi-persistence layer. Two 9s and cross-platform to boot. Recently I made a diet checklist [1] that I've been following more or less to the letter 5 days out of the week. I have a little Android button that just opens right up to the web page. I click, click, click, then move on with m…

I came here to say exactly this. You can even set up build steps using GitHub Actions if you prefer something beyond vanilla JS, or publish the project for free on Cloudflare, even from private repositories. In addition to localStorage, IndexedDB is also very useful. It's easy to export the app’s data as JSON for better persistence, and you could store it on Google Drive or a similar service.
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