I made a couple apps that only I use and is very niche because probably only I would use it but very helpful.
An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)
191–200 of 296 posts
Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)
#192At 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…
I've been thinking about this a lot, and I have two solutions:
* distribute on Testflight and never actually do a real release
* make an HTML app that works well on mobile, and can be cached for offline
Gradually I think I'm coming to prefer doing the HTML version
Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed. The #1 thing I need from my platforms is that I don't need to get anyone else's permission to develop and install any programs on it that I wish. That basically rules out Apple and Microsoft.
I say this as a Linux user What do you mean by ruling out Microsoft? You can install and run your own software on Windows?
Unless it's a driver. Windows wants those signed by Microsoft. There are ways to get around that, but they're not wonderful.
This bit me a month or so ago at work. I don't use Windows at home.
Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had the same question. He says TestFlight, but he's handwaving some of the headaches of that. TF builds expire every 90 days. The other option would be an adhoc certificate, but then you have to collect everyone's apple id. Apple makes this kind of app distribution process more painful than it needs to be.
It should hopefully be easier in the future when side loading is possible on iOS.
Sideloading is still blocked in the US in their new releases. Only allowed where mandated (EU)
Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)
#195This post significantly influenced me back when it was first on HN, and helped me articulate what I was already doing subconsciously. I started a homelab years ago like a lot of folks here, and slowly that’s changed to being a hobby of building and selfhosting applications for my “users” of 5-15 of my family and closest friends. I’ve written so many little apps for them (e.g movie night scheduler) and integrations in…
I love writing little tools - but I tend to do so for others, than myself. My GF and her Sister kept a running tab (Beans) between them - and always were having issues reconciling who owes what for when etc... These are smart and capable women, but for some reason their personal tab between eachother was a headache - so an "app" I made was just a smarter spreadsheet in google docs they share and they enter their info…
I love all the comments that I'm reading here, but for most of the cases that are being presented, I'm having a hard time imagining myself needing to do the same, because for the most part there is always an app that already covers that need.
For example, your use case sounds like the ideal scenario for Settle Up. Me and my 2 closest friends have a running group where we annotate expenses and there's always a clear picture of who owes what amount and for what reasons.
Of course, tiny customizations like a dog's picture per month, are not possible to do with a 3rd party app :-)
Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)
#196Earlier 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 have my secret perversions as well, so I've got no judgement for you, but I do have to wonder how our editing styles differ if you find that easier to navigate than the equivalent nested for loop.
Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)
#197This is poetry. I have been working on a personal project for the last 10 years that replaces every other app I used to use - E-mail, calendar, and all the others we all use on a daily basis - and every time someone sees me using it they ask "Wow, this is amazing, how do I download it!?", and the answer is always the same: you don't. There's a beauty to engineering something having yourself as the target user, and no…
Why would you want to combine it all into one app? Having seperate apps for those things (maybe besides having calendar and email together) sounds proper to me. Seems odd to put it all together into one.
Proper so that people who only want to use part of it don't have to use all of it. But if your user base is one person then why not go seamless? If you dislike that part of the app, just delete it.
Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)
#198> 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. I burned some incense and threw some stones and the gods of Xcode allowed me to pass. This resonated with me. This is a major source of friction to "scratching your own itch" in modern software development. Makes it extremely…
This is where a pi web server along with cloudflare tunnel and a website really shine. You don't need to ask anyone to run that service. I'm running a custom todo app off my pi without exposing my router. It's incredibly freeing.
Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)
#199At 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 cha…
> don't you feel like this is true of most software (that it's never "done")?
The problem is that "done" is a subjective term. Most of the software I use on a regular basis is "done" as far as I'm concerned. If it didn't meet my needs, I wouldn't be using it on a regular basis.
This ignores security issues, of course, but most of the software I use on the regular doesn't have a networking component, so that's not as much of an issue.
Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)
#200At 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…
Considerations like these have lead me to Nim. I don't have it working yet, but the vision is that if I constrain myself to a simple enough UI then I can then compile the same code to Objective C for iStuff, C++ for Android and desktop, and Javascript for web. Those apps can each then evaluate arbitrary nimscript in a platform agnostic way. I've log ago forgotten what the app I wanted to build was, but if I remember it, nobody will be able to stop me from running it anywhere. I hope.