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> In our actual world, I built it in about a week, and roughly half of that time was spent wrestling with different flavors of code-signing and identity provisioning and I don’t even know what.
Are you listening, Apple?
Really resonates with my recent experiences. I want off the software equivalent of the fast food menu - crap designed to bring in the most revenue for the least expense, user health and preferences be damned. I've already started replacing a lot of the "as a service" software I used with self-hosted equivalents. The next one I really want to hit is "family chat" since Apple is still making a mess of it for folks with…
Please build this! I have a large family with a mix of android and ios users, ages 18 to 80. We end up using long running text message threads as an ad-hoc social network, with people posting pictures, links, updates, comments, etc., and things get disorganized because discussions are not threaded.
I would love "reddit for families" -- for lack of a better description. Threaded discussion with easy "posting" of pictures, links, and videos, with a simple interface similar to imessage or google messages, which everyone already knows how to use.
> In a better world, I would have built this in a day, using some kind of modern, flexible HyperCard for iOS. > > In our actual world, I built it in about a week, and roughly half of that time was spent wrestling with different flavors of code-signing and identity provisioning and I don’t even know what. Are you listening, Apple?
Wow, this article hits home. Recently my wife and I were admiring the full moon, and she wondered aloud how many moons we'd been together and said, "maybe you should use your programming stuff to find out." A month later I surprised her with a home cooked Android app called RacoonMoon. It features a random picture of us, and along with some very cheesy love messages and inside jokes, says how many moons we've been to…
> In a better world, I would have built this in a day, using some kind of modern, flexible HyperCard for iOS. > > In our actual world, I built it in about a week, and roughly half of that time was spent wrestling with different flavors of code-signing and identity provisioning and I don’t even know what. Are you listening, Apple?
A common person isn't able to do what the author did, meaning they'll have to reach for the app store. Conveniently, Apple gets a cut of sales on the app store. The conflicts of interest are clear.
I can imagine that a good platform for making "home-cooked apps" would be beneficial both to Apple and to buyers of their products.
I believe Shortcuts was a move in the right direction.
Really resonates with my recent experiences. I want off the software equivalent of the fast food menu - crap designed to bring in the most revenue for the least expense, user health and preferences be damned. I've already started replacing a lot of the "as a service" software I used with self-hosted equivalents. The next one I really want to hit is "family chat" since Apple is still making a mess of it for folks with…
We can also access the shopping list on our phones while shopping. I built a feature that sorts the products by aisle (specific to our local supermarket), making it easier to do the shop easily/quickly.
I'm sure there are commercial (not even paid neccessarily) apps that do all this, but this one is used only by us and it's built to perfectly interact with our lives and circumstances:
* Things are hard-coded that would make no sense in a publicly available app, or would be very difficult to build customisation for. Hardcoding things is easy, building UI is hard. We're so used to building things in the commercial space for scale we forget how easy it is to build small things that will never need to scale beyond a userbase of 1-2.
* It has remained almost entirely unchanged in UI and features for ~10 years now. Can you say that of any other piece of software you use on a daily basis?
Would be interested to know how long such an app could exist on the App Store. Apple is not fond of apps that are rarely updated.
* fictional quote but it wouldn't shock me if it became real