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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

#131

Post by trinix912 »

parpfish wrote: post #106
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…

i'd argue that the biggest hurdle to home cooked software is finding a way to distribute/deploy it among your friends. im a backend guy and can easily make a useful li'l executable to run on my work machine. but how do i share that with people that will only use their smartphone for computing? i either have to: - make something browser-based, register a domain, and then pay somebody to host it. that's a lot of hoops…

The easiest I can think of is making a spreadsheet. Share an Excel file over OneDrive or even a Google Sheet. The built-in features/formulas are enough for most of these use cases; if you want to go further, there's VBA (and the nightmare that comes with it - but it's less of a nightmare than paying and setting up a domain and dealing with the security of that).

I know several people who do that - non-programmers - with formulas and VBA in Excel sheets.

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

#133

Post by jorvi »

belmarca wrote: post #122
jorvi wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Instead of a landing page, may I suggest a '?' button, or at least putting the landing page on https://codeboot.org/something and redirecting from referrers but not direct loads?

Browsers are getting more and more aggressive about deleting cookies / making cookies ephemeral, and nothing is more annoying that dealing with one or multiple pop-ups on each page visit.

For an example of how bad it can get, load LMarena in a private window.

  Cookie pop-up, agree > type something, press enter > ToS pop-up, agree > press enter again > processing > answer > type somethi- verify Cloudflare, agree > type something
Other than that I don't have much comments yet except that it seems a nice product!

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

#134

Post by jrcplus »

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…

Scrappy co-creator here. I fully agree that software longevity is important. We designed Scrappy with a local-first architecture, so we have no traditional backend. Our only cloud dependency is a lightweight sync server. (We hurriedly added an FAQ with some more technical details after we discovered that this blew up on HN.) I believe this is an important point of distinction, both technically and financially, from most low-code/no-code tools which are SaaS'es.

One idea we had early on is the ability to save scrapps as single-page self-contained HTML files. We experimented with this but the functionality isn't currently exposed.

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

#135

Post by jrcplus »

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…

Scrappy co-creator here. As an old-school Mac user (from the days of desktop publishing) I do know the difference between hyphen and en-dash and em-dash :)

We used AI sparsely for wordsmithing and definitely not for generating the text. Believe me, putting it together was a lot of work (Pontus did the heavy lifting).

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

#137

Post by al_borland »

rchaud wrote: post #126
slightwinder wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mob…

PHP has its own built-in web server for local dev and testing. I tend to just use that when I need it.

cd ~/html

php -S localhost:8000

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

#138

Post by al_borland »

jrcplus wrote: post #134
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…

Scrappy co-creator here. I fully agree that software longevity is important. We designed Scrappy with a local-first architecture, so we have no traditional backend. Our only cloud dependency is a lightweight sync server. (We hurriedly added an FAQ with some more technical details after we discovered that this blew up on HN.) I believe this is an important point of distinction, both technically and financially, from m…

Being able to download a self-contained html file would be great. Not only for longevity, but also for situations where internet access may be questionable.

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

#139

Post by belmarca »

jorvi wrote: post #133
belmarca wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Instead of a landing page, may I suggest a '?' button, or at least putting the landing page on https://codeboot.org/something and redirecting from referrers but not direct loads? Browsers are getting more and more aggressive about deleting cookies / making cookies ephemeral, and nothing is more annoying that dealing with one or multiple pop-ups on each page visit. For an example of how bad it can get, load LMarena in…

We are thinking about using two domains: codeboot.org for "company" things, and codeboot.app for the actual IDE and user applications. Or vice-versa.

We don't want to break the current experience but we need to do a better job of explaining what our software can do.

I appreciate your comments!

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

#140

Post by culopatin »

tokioyoyo wrote: post #20

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…

Wow I’ve had this idea in my pocket for a long time, thanks for making it real!
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