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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

#121

Post by jorvi »

belmarca wrote: post #109
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…

You should check out https://codeboot.org . It's a fully client-side Python IDE with single-stepping, a virtual (non-hierarchical) filesystem, an FFI to call JS code and a few other things (see the docs). Sharing apps in CodeBoot is trivial: right-click the "play" button and copy a shareable URL. I have helped people solve data wrangling problems using CodeBoot and they now have their little app bookmarked. It works…

Can I just say I adore the absolute utility of the UX and UI?

No welcome screen, just dropped straight into the main interface which itself has no excess buttons or styling wasted on it.

To me this is beautiful.

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

#122

Post by belmarca »

jorvi wrote: post #121
belmarca wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should check out https://codeboot.org . It's a fully client-side Python IDE with single-stepping, a virtual (non-hierarchical) filesystem, an FFI to call JS code and a few other things (see the docs). Sharing apps in CodeBoot is trivial: right-click the "play" button and copy a shareable URL. I have helped people solve data wrangling problems using CodeBoot and they now have their little app bookmarked. It works…

Can I just say I adore the absolute utility of the UX and UI? No welcome screen, just dropped straight into the main interface which itself has no excess buttons or styling wasted on it. To me this is beautiful.

Really glad you appreciate! We use it to teach introductory programing courses and the simplistic UI is purpose-built for that use-case.

It really is a joy to program with, but we're struggling a bit to communicate everything it can do. We are working hard on that front and should have a landing page and better explanatory material soon. We're very interested in feedback. If anybody wants to learn more, just contact me through the email in my profile.

Cheers!

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

#123

Post by ramses0 »

panphora wrote: post #117
WillAdams wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This looks _very_ cool --- does it align with: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/192405005-hypermedia-sys... (and if not, are you aware of a book which touches on/explains your technique?) Do you think a visual tool for this could be created? (something like Lazarus or Interface Builder or QT Designer...)

Yes, there's definitely philosophical alignment with the hypermedia approach: keeping things simple and leveraging HTML's native capabilities. In fact, I use hypermedia-oriented techniques on all the dashboard pages in the Hyperclay web app. But in Hyperclay apps, the DOM is the source of truth -- there's nothing else. So there's no need for more than a single AJAX call (to save the page). HTMX is built to support a…

I'm a little experienced with TiddlyWiki, from memory: `rclone serve webdav` in the directory with TiddlyWiki will let you "write in place".

My use case was a home maintenance wiki/manual, the incredible benefits of something like TiddlyWiki in this use case is the ultimate survivability of it.

Open `HomeManual.html` in any browser and you can read it (and modify it!) and literally File -> Save As... `HomeManual-2025-07-18.html`. For more convenience: `rclone serve webdav` and the "(*) Save..." button works to save in place.

Ultimate survivability. Self-contained, it works on mobile, pairs great with SyncThing, devolves into read only, has a "normie-understandable" option for modifications.

Really, what I'd prefer is a bit less complexity of the wiki itself, and some slightly better integration between `exportAllPages("*.md")` and "AllTogether.html". I'd love to be able to pop open vim 90% of the time and somehow "merge things" as expected (conflict-aware, diff-ish integration).

Take a look at the use cases I've described and it'd be amazing to have a framework "Quine.html" (that can self-reproduce) that was less complicated than all the cruft that's built up in TiddlyWiki.

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

#124

Post by joshlemer »

sReinwald wrote: post #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…

> they're building a product for people who can write JavaScript event handlers but somehow can't 'npx create-react-app'

There's an enormous gap in complexity, required skill, etc between creating these Scrappy applications and building the whole app in React, and then getting it deployed, complete with real time syncing, authorization (as they've implemented with their "frames" and everything. It's at least an order of magnitude greater in effort.

> software, unlike a meal or a home-made sweater, comes with an implicit support contract that lasts forever

I don't think it always has to. It tends to be that way because so far, the lift to create a functioning cross-device multi user application has been high enough that the economics of it requires centralized teams of specialists to build an application for many hundreds of people.

If you lower the stakes really low to the point where the app is as serious as a spreadsheet, then compare it to spreadsheets. Almost everyone has dozens of really casual spreadsheets, many households have shared google sheets for particular, short-lived or casual or constantly changing use-cases. When you slap together a spreadsheet with your partner, you aren't making a promise about long term support and compatibility with the spreadsheet.

Or an other similar thing would just be paper and pen and tape, up on a whiteboard. All kinds of little "hand made" "applications" like this exist in households and in offices. Kanban boards are an example of this but there's and endless different kinds of "board-based physical apps" like chore charts and weekly meal plans. When someone writes on their fridge a list of chores and starts tallying who does what, that is not an eternal promise to maintain the piece of paper with chores and tally marks protocol/system.

The comments about being a SAAS, walled garden, and about the specific implementation here wrt where data's stored etc, this is just a prototype. A POC.

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

#126

Post by rchaud »

slightwinder wrote: post #97
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 see…

Apps need a local server to work (especially if it writes to a local database), or be shipped in some kind of executable file format for the OS. As someone who can't code native apps but is decent enough in PHP, I've discovered that the way to solve my own problem is to run a bash script that loads an Apache server, then loads the index.php file of my app, all of which is stored locally on my hard drive. Works on mobile too, although I have to manually launch an Apache server first through termux.

Modern computing badly needs the ability to support building our own local apps without a remote web server dependency. This is how computing worked in the pre-internet age. HyperCard could connect to a database as could Filemaker Pro. Windows had something similar where GUI-based apps could read/write to an Access DB. These tools have been deprecated and only live on in some subscription-based SaaS.

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

#127

Post by juped »

blips wrote: 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…

To type an em dash, an important punctuation mark, press compose and then hyphen thrice. — ←like this. Shift-option-hyphen on Macs, I think.

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

#129

Post by trinix912 »

4ndrewl wrote: post #73
_joel wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

except it's broken

Vibe coding seems to be synonymous with "sort of works, bunch of bugs"

If you can get over the critical errors. That's the showstopper for most non-programmers. Perhaps not as much for the so-called "power users" who can hack together some Excel VBA, but even then there's a lot of setup to get simple projects rolling. Down to the little things like knowing that a .js file is a JavaScript file (and what that means). It's obvious to us, but definitely not to the average person, unless they're willing to invest significant time into it - which most aren't.
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