Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Scrappy – Make little apps for you and your friends

pontus.granstrom.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 153 posts

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

#91

Post by II2II »

al_borland wrote: post #80
bandoti wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems the way to go would be to open source the SaaS code to ensure that longevity. The folks at Penpot have a good thing going with that—most people will use the SaaS offering but it’s available for self-hosting. One of the difficulties of course is notarizing/signing the apps and so-forth. Perhaps some Web3 solutions could help as well. OR, another option would be like what PICO-8 does (or flash I guess)—release…

I was also thinking back to when I used TiddlyWiki almost 20 years ago. If this tool is effectively just HTML, CSS, and Javascript... could they bake it all into a single HTML file. Download a template, design your app offline, and save your work to a file that can run on its own, offline, in a browser window. Maybe the about of JS they need to bake in, or images, would make that impractical. Of course, as it stands,…

Vibe coding may get the job done, but it isn't going to be as fun for someone who wants to write a little app for a friend. Also, chances are that the generated code is going to be less friendly for a novice to edit should the want/need to make changes.

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

#92

Post by jrcplus »

swyx wrote: post #35

> All Scrappy apps are multiplayer, like a Google Doc is. You can even edit them while they are being used by someone else! ok where is the scrappy backend? what data do you see? where do i make an account? i wish that this was more transparent/discussed since obviously this software is not entirely local? > LLMs are getting better and better, and while they are far from able to make a full-fledged app without a lot…

Scrappy co-creator here. It was a surprise to us that this blew up on HN. We've hurriedly added an FAQ to the write-up.

In regards to this question about the "Scrappy backend": Scrappy is local-first, so data is stored locally in your browser, and optionally replicated to a lightweight sync server, to help coordinate syncing between peers. In other words, Scrappy is almost entirely front-end. The only third-party dependencies are Yjs https://yjs.dev/> and CodeMirror https://codemirror.net/>. We don’t use any other libraries or frameworks like React. There’s no analytics.

And there's no traditional backend. The only cloud dependency is the sync server, which is a plain vanilla y-websocket-server https://github.com/yjs/y-websocket-server/>.

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

#95

Post by WillAdams »

bowsamic wrote: post #6

I would if Apple didn’t put such tight restrictions against hobby app creation

I had great hopes for Applescript Studio, and was very hopeful it would grow into a widely-used HyperCard alternative.

https://macosxautomation.com/applescript/develop/index.html

seems to show the current state, which is a heavy lift for most people.

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

#97

Post by slightwinder »

al_borland wrote: post #70

I like the spirit of it, but the execution isn't what I'm looking for. With this being a hosted solution, it makes me dependent on another SaaS tool for little personal projects. If it's a little counter needed for an afternoon, that's not such a big deal. However, if I'm looking for a scrappy little app I may use for years, this is a problem. Plus, no matter how low the learning curve gets, it will still exist, so I…

This looks like something that should be done like a TiddlyWiki. A TiddlyWiki is a whole Webapplication in a single HTML-File. Traditionally, when you change something, you just save the HTML-File and it self-replicates with the new data. There are now also TiddlyWikis which can save to backends and probably some other ways.

Building a whole platform around self-replicating HTML-files with optional backend-access seems to be the more reliable solution for small personalized stuff. At least it has a strong resilience.

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

#99

Post by djmips »

selcuka wrote: 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...

I would change the ? to a blank or underscore

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

#100

Post by [deleted] »

al_borland wrote: post #80
bandoti wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems the way to go would be to open source the SaaS code to ensure that longevity. The folks at Penpot have a good thing going with that—most people will use the SaaS offering but it’s available for self-hosting. One of the difficulties of course is notarizing/signing the apps and so-forth. Perhaps some Web3 solutions could help as well. OR, another option would be like what PICO-8 does (or flash I guess)—release…

I was also thinking back to when I used TiddlyWiki almost 20 years ago. If this tool is effectively just HTML, CSS, and Javascript... could they bake it all into a single HTML file. Download a template, design your app offline, and save your work to a file that can run on its own, offline, in a browser window. Maybe the about of JS they need to bake in, or images, would make that impractical. Of course, as it stands,…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN