It is kind of amusing to see this presented as a novel concept. This is how all software development worked once upon a time. Computers used to ship with BASIC interpreters, not app stores or package managers.
An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)
181–190 of 296 posts
Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you elaborate on what you would need to do different in terms of dev? The only thing I would do differently in this scenario would be to ensure no secrets or anything gets into the code which is a minor lift but also probably for the best.
In python I do horrible things like the following when nobody else is going to see it: [[[foo(x) for x in y] for y in bar_vec if baz(y)] for bar_vec in bar_mat if bar_vec != []]
I dunno, that seems to be just shame instilled by the toxicity of certain programmer culture.
I mean, it's not the clearest thing to read but labeling it horrible seems to be a judgement call that's unwarranted. And as software developers, we should create an environment that's less hostile to people who write things in ways we wouldn't.
And honestly, that set of list comprehensions has a bit of a lispy functional vibe, which could quite frankly be applauded in certain contexts.
Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)
#183This post changed my mind about sideloading on iPhones. Before I read it I was firmly in the camp of “lock it down, so grandma doesn’t get hacked.” But now I just think it stops people from making home cooked meal apps like this. I also think it propagates the notion that computers are magic and should only be programmed by magicians. But no software developer I have ever met has felt this way. I don’t feel this way.
I think grandma-mode should still be the default, but with some arcane startup ritual to enable sideloading that you only have to do once, with said process being replete with "HERE BE DRAGONS" warnings. Basically make it more like a mac or a typical chromebook. Pixel phones still let you root them, don't they?
Yes, I don’t know exactly what it’d entail but enabling sideloading really does need to be something that’s sufficiently scary to the non-technical to help curb social engineering by fake “Microsoft support” and such.
It’s somewhat painful and inconvenient but the old desktop OS model where arbitrary code can not only be run at a whim, but also gets free reign to do whatever it pleases simply doesn’t scale to the masses. It was a problem even prior to smartphones but has only gotten worse as larger swathes of the population have come aboard.
Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)
#184This is super interesting. Took me until nearly the end, when he started talking about how he wouldn't last as a professional software engineer, to find out he isn't one.
Great way of looking at programming. It really is just another way to create, akin to drawing or writing, and it feels as if we almost desecrate it by treating it the way we do. Inspiring article.
Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lovely article but this made me sad/mad. How did we get to the point where this is acceptable? MAGA (Microsoft Apple Google Amazon) have a stultifying effect in our software sharing lives now.
>How did we get to the point where this is acceptable? IMO, bad actors. 40 years ago we didn't need much in the name of cyber security, restrictions, controls, etc. You most likely personally knew the vast majority of other people that had any kind of access to your systems, or that you exchanged any kind of electronic data with. As the aperture of users and developers has opened, risks have increased. There is proba…
Exactly. Even major “trusted” third parties like Adobe can’t actually be trusted to keep their fingers out of parts of the system they have no business poking around in. Time and time again it’s been proven prudent to treat third party devs as hostile parties by default, with trust being hard-earned.
Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)
#186Great read! This reminds me of a macOS app I made for my wife a few years back. It keeps track of the opening hours of all her favorite shops, and she can click a menu bar icon to see how long until each one closes today. It also warns if it's currently peak/rush hour for the shop, since she prefers to go when it's less crowded. It's a simple Qt app that uses a text file for data storage. I wrote it after noticing th…
This is incredible, thank you for sharing.
Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)
#187At the same time, I feel the gap is widening between these and professional apps. It's easier to write apps, and it's harder to write "real" apps (for the masses). I'm writing a book ( https://opinionatedlaunch.com ) over the course of 3+ years and I have to keep updating the "Mobile" chapters. Not because of some fancy new framework, but because both Apple and Google keep adding "requirements." Sure, they're for the…
> there's no "done"
I'm totally with you re: Android and Apple being walled-garden ecosystems with ever-changing rules. But, don't you feel like this is true of most software (that it's never "done")? In my experience, there aren't many categories of software that can be truly feature-complete unless they are fully decoupled from popular culture. Maybe GNU units or grep can be called "done", but most apps have to change with the world around them.
Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you be open to sharing screenshots? I'm curious about the mental-sanity claim, do you not have your email + calendar setup on your phone?
Not OP, but how often do you have an app that is exactly how you want it? You might just shrug off the small annoyances, but you could fix them and make the app something that becomes second nature. The UI won't suddenly change, so you won't have to relearn how to use the app, just like you don't have to relearn physical interfaces.
This is (largely) why I do all my coding work in an editor of my own creation. It suits me perfectly, and it never changes unless I want it to.
Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)
#189I do this too, I write scripts, and one-file apps that solve issues that only I think I have. Like I've been running an InternetReachable.swift [1] manually at the CLI for months to have a nice visualization of when my internet connection is not actually working. I travel a lot by train, and some regions have spotty 3G. I got tired of looking at `ping 1.1.1.1` output lines until the connection came back.
But for whatever reason I get the urge to polish the thing, make a pretty icon for it and publish it in the hope that others might also have the same weird specific need as me. That script above just turned into an app called IsThereNet : https://lowtechguys.com/istherenet
I'm not sure why, but I get a little dopamine hit when I see people learning a thing or two from my experiments. I guess that's why we still do the kind of open source that doesn't ask for money.
[1] https://gist.github.com/alin23/e15b6ffc62a85790096f0228c54fd...
Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)
#190I do this too, I write scripts, and one-file apps that solve issues that only I think I have. Like I've been running an InternetReachable.swift [1] manually at the CLI for months to have a nice visualization of when my internet connection is not actually working. I travel a lot by train, and some regions have spotty 3G. I got tired of looking at `ping 1.1.1.1` output lines until the connection came back. But for what…
Thank you very much. A few times I've been out on site and someone will told me that "the internet has gone down." I can easily spend hours offline programming, so this app is perfect for me to keep an eye on it.