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Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud

blog.acolyer.org

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Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud

#221

Post by calferreira »

72deluxe wrote: post #164
calferreira wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion it's not all about lazyness. You have to consider the costs of building an app native for each platform vs a cross platform framework built with javascript. Single javascript code base for all platforms is a lot cheaper.

I am not sure on that really. I built a cross-platform control software for high-end audio equipment that ran on macOS and Windows and did all of its own drawing (charts, graphs, ALL controls [knobs, buttons, grids, faders etc etc etc], 2D overview with links of all devices, 3D scene of venue layout with OpenGL, diagrams, alerts and floating popup windows). No bitmaps used anywhere, all generated in code. Another guy…

The difference between you and the big corps is, you care, they don't.

You care about delivering a high quality and high performance application, big corps just want to sell a product.

Also, just because they have a bigger budget doesn't mean they are all about spending it, they probably want to squeeze it as much as they can.

Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud

#222

Post by ricg »

jonpurdy wrote: post #170
ricg wrote: post #71

"It should support data access for all time." - This is key for me after I had to convert my notes more than once between formats after the original app(s) went into extinction (beloved Circus Ponies Notebook). That's why I'm designing any new apps around a file format that can be accessed even without the app. I have a "local-first" Kanban/Trello-style app, "Boards" ( http://kitestack.com/boards/ ), that uses zipped…

I just tried Boards out. It's really nice and exactly what I wish Trello could be for a single user. Will follow the progress on this for sure.

Thanks for your feedback! I don't have a newsletter signup just yet, but if you'd like to hear about new versions, send me a quick email through the app (Help → Contact Support) and I'll add you to the list.

Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud

#223

Post by have_faith »

mebreuer wrote: post #195
have_faith wrote: post #135

> you OWN YOUR data Like most people here I'm fairly hard line when it comes to personal data abuses but I still struggle with the concepts of owning data about yourself. It's a confusion I see amongst less technically literate people when a well meaning person explains to them the importance of some latest data breach and they try to understand the concept that they owned this data, it was theirs but now it has been…

This comment made me think about how uneven the expectations are about whether data is owned by the person who collected it or the person who it was collected about. I think most people would agree that if you take a photo of someone who agrees to you taking it, you own the rights to that photo. But if a company collects data about someone voluntarily using that company's product, the person owns that data? I don't u…

Exactly my train of thought. Most people don't consider the photograph to be data where we likely would.

Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud

#224

Post by jka »

copperpot wrote: post #188
jka wrote: post #56

As far as possible, I'm following a local-first methodology for a recipe search, meal planner, and shopping list application: https://www.reciperadar.com There's a 'collaboration' mode which allows peer-to-peer sharing of a session via CRDTs over IPFS. My partner and I select our meals for the week, and then when one of us is doing the shopping, we can mark ingredients as found -- the other person's view reflects tho…

This is really neat, thank you for sharing and developing! I plan to use this to simplify mealtime in my household. One note, as I have not used it much: the "Most relevant" sorting scheme (or perhaps just the search function itself) needs some love. I searched for "chicken" as the sole ingredient, and of the 10 results on page one, only the ninth result is a recipe containing chicken. Many of the rest are desserts.…

Thanks for trying it out :)

In response I've made some changes to search indexing for 'chicken'-related ingredients; I explicitly want some terms like 'chicken breast' to fall under the category 'chicken', but yep, 'chicken bouillon' and a few others don't seem relevant.

Hope that helps - glad to keep on narrowing down on any extra cases you find too. There's a small 'feedback' button at the bottom-right-hand corner of the page which sends messages directly to my inbox.

Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud

#225

Post by smush »

mceachen wrote: post #163
StavrosK wrote: post #106

So I got fed up with current image hosting solutions the other day, because I realized free image hosting is unsustainable and Imgur has turned into a social network, which is the opposite of what I want. So, I figured I'd create my own paid one, and am working on https://imgz.org . However, I want to add a free tier for people who are willing to host their own images, and was thinking of writing a daemon that would…

I've been working on PhotoStructure (not so much to be an imgur replacement, but as a way to automatically organize and share my large (many tb) and disorganized (due to failed photo apps and cos) pile of photos and videos. I'm releasing to a new wave of beta users soon if you want to sign up and try it out. It's a self-hosted solution with a web UI. https://blog.photostructure.com/introducing-photostructure/ As one…

Note that PhotoStructure on Windows IIRC Windows 10 only.

Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud

#226

Post by garfieldnate »

This. I want this. It happens to me quite often that I feel demotivated or uneasy about using some software because I know I'm producing valuable data specific to me that I could use in the future, but the product stipulates that I don't get to keep the data. iOS apps are often the worst at this. There's no filesystem, so all data has to be kept with an app. I loaded all of the books I wanted to read into iBooks, and then it turned out that the iOS backup skips books that you didn't buy from Apple. Bye bye book collection T_T.

Some of this could also be alleviated by Tim Berners-Lee's pod idea: https://solid.inrupt.com/. But local-first is better. I just want files on my machine.

Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud

#227

Post by emilecantin »

adamwiggins wrote: post #177
daleharvey wrote: post #123

I may be biased as the maintainer of PouchDB but you can do all this today (and for the last 5+ years) with PouchDB. The comment about CouchDB and the "difficulty of getting application-level conflict resolution right" I am not really certain how it applies, You dont have to handle conflicts in Pouch/CouchDB if you dont want to, there is a default model of last write (actually most edits) wins but you can handle them…

Hi Dale, I'm one of the local-first paper coauthors. I'm a fan of PouchDB (thanks for that) and the whole CouchDB lineage--the CouchDB book[1] was an early inspiration in my exploration of next-gen storage and collab models. I've been down the CouchDB/PouchDB path several times with several different engineering teams. Every time we were hopeful and every time we just couldn't get it to work. As one example, I worked…

I'm currently working on an app using PouchDB, and the approach I've taken is using one database per "project" in my app. I'm not there yet, but I'll use another database to manage users & access control. These aren't things you want to sync anyway; I might even end up with a regular SQL database for this (I haven't decided yet).

I hope this approach avoids most of the pitfalls you mentioned.

Your Git analogy is also spot-on, but I think you don't take it far enough. Creating a repo is cheap, and I believe CouchDB databases are, too (altough I'm still very new at this). You seemed hesitant to create too many.

Good point about notifications, though. I think you'll still have to have a server process that manages that kind of thing (and probably inserts notifications in other users's databases).

Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud

#228

Post by atrilumen »

gobengo wrote: post #6

The blog post doesn't mention this, so I thought I'd point this out. One of the paper's authors is Martin Kleppmann, who wrote the very good https://dataintensive.net/ book.

And don't miss "Turning the database inside out with Apache Samza"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fU9hR3kiOK0

Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud

#229

Post by mceachen »

emilburzo wrote: post #218
jmathai wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uploading to both services is still supported through the Backup and Sync app. But once uploaded they are independent copies and deleting from one doesn't delete from the other. I also expect that this support will be deprecated at some point in the future. Not keeping Drive and Photos in sync really killed it for me. I ended up switching from Google Drive to Dropbox but I still use Google Photos. I have photos added…

I see. I was hoping there was still some way to quickly backup from google photos directly to linux.

You can use https://github.com/mholt/timeliner (open source)

Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud

#230

Post by jefurii »

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned using git-annex (and Git of course) to manage data (full disclosure: I develop an archival management app which keeps its data in git/git-annex repositories). Of the seven key properties, git-annex gives you 1,2,3,4 and supports 5 and 7; 6 depends on how you store things. Git-annex supports identity in the sense that each clone of the repository has a UUID. You can choose to have a central hub if you like but you don't have to (surprise! you don't really need GitHub!). It comes with caveats of course: Binaries can be synced but only textual data is actually versioned, and once you put something in it will always be there unless you use something like git-filter-branch.
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