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An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)

robinsloan.com

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Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)

#221

Post by vinc »

wiradikusuma wrote: post #72

At 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…

This happened to me. I wrote an Android app many years ago for my own need and after a month or two it was done. I have nothing to change, it works exactly as I want. But at some point Google decided that it didn't keep up and needed to be removed from the store. I'm not complaining, I can still install it with `adb` but nobody else can anymore. I'm not sure I can still build the binary though, probably not.

Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)

#222

Post by _fool »

supertron wrote: post #40

I enjoyed the "Colophon" page almost as much as the article https://www.robinsloan.com/colophon/ I love the built-in style guide. I'm totally stealing some ideas from that...

If you liked that, check out also his newsletter and his fiction writing - both are stellar (his is the only newsletter I read, even though I pay for other ones!)

Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)

#223

Post by fuzztester »

spenczar5 wrote: post #96
caipira wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's basically like the Google suite of apps or Next Cloud, I have the main app where you can manage your account, backups, etc, and it links to a bunch of other apps, each one living in a subdomain. The apps that already exists are: - Password manager - Finances - Contacts - Account (Backup, Restore, private keys, etc) - Authenticator (OTP, TOTP) - Email - Photos - Movies (2 parts, one is an IMDB like manager and th…

“Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.” - Zawinski’s Law :)

There ought to be a law (or n ...) about JavaScript frameworks.

Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)

#224

Post by nicbou »

rthomas6 wrote: post #174
bberenberg wrote: post #169

Earlier 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 != []]

This is fine. I make all of my stuff open source, but I'll be honest with people about being the only user that matters to my development work.

Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)

#225

Post by kridsdale1 »

andiareso wrote: post #138
PawgerZ wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to let you know, that wasn't the original commentor, so it could stil involve scrpaing (which is what I expected, too).

I would guess using Google's Places API. They have busy time reports and hours that are most likely updated by the business owner. No scraping needed

Busy Time is actually not available to the places API. It’s one of the top request features though. There’s a legal/PII dimension to the issue.

Open Hours though are easy to read from the json response.

Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)

#226

Post by kjkjadksj »

wiradikusuma wrote: post #72

At 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…

Depends on your audience. In my field all the cutting edge tooling is used in script or interactive command line. Writing for that sort of interface is so much faster and easier than making a gui even with modern libraries. You can still get plenty of users writing for a command line audience. There are like 40 million conda users for example.

Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)

#227

Post by dingnuts »

ParetoOptimal wrote: post #85
HKH2 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The above are all reasons I use emacs.

for REAL. when I started using Emacs, everyone told me Emacs was old and I should use Sublime Text II or Atom. Now they all tell me Emacs is old and I should use VS Code. I wonder what they'll tell me to use instead of Emacs in ten years :)

Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)

#228

Post by kjkjadksj »

bhpm wrote: post #128

This 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.

The only reason they lock it down is the 30% take from the app store. Grandma is more likely to lose her savings over the landline with good old fashioned social engineering over anything with that phone. If they actually cared about security and spam beyond profiting from app store or the repair situation, they’d have at least lifted a finger with imessage spam by now.

Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)

#229

Post by whompyjaw »

caipira wrote: post #19

This 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…

Curious, how deep does the DIY go? I am curious what tools you currently leverage to support your tool? For example, instead of using ripgrep, did you create your own easy-grep program? Or anything in that similar vein? Just curious of anything you’d like to share :)

Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)

#230

Post by pech0rin »

bberenberg wrote: post #144
caipira wrote: post #19

This 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…

I wish more people would take stuff like this, oss it, and disable PR requests and issues. Let others use it / learn / build on it with the clear expectation that feedback and contributions are unwanted.

I disagree with this. If you are truly building for yourself there is no criticism, no prying eyes, it is well and truly yours. Even with PR and issues closed people read it, maybe comment about it on social media or hackernews. There is beauty in a creation that is complete private.
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