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

robinsloan.com

261–270 of 296 posts

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

#261
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…

> There's a beauty to engineering something having yourself as the target user, and no one else. 100%, I'm following a similar approach to you with yet another notes app solely for my own use. Have you written more about your personal project anywhere? One thing I only realised once I started building my own tools, is that you become - from day one - an unmatched world-class expert in using that tool. This seems obvi…

I did two yet another notes apps, one including a custom P2P sync backend, All abandoned for Google Keep, but it was definitely interesting.

Ever so often I think about trying again, which I might in fact do if Keep ever becomes paid or stops working well or anything like that, or battery-free Bluetooth gets cheap and common and I decide to integrate inventory tracking features.

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

#262

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.

It’s not novel so much as an invitation to do the same.

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

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another way could be host it on a Tailscale network, then it can only be accessed by your own devices.

We need something that goes one level beyond Tailscale. It should be built on a simple open OAuth2 protocol for establishing tunnels/VPNs so you can choose different providers. Then developers can implement tunneled networking directly into their apps.

Do you want to share publicly (via a URL for anyone) or privately (accessible only with an endpoint and identity)?

For the former, zrok frontdoor (by https://docs.zrok.io/docs/guides/frontdoor/) protected by OAuth could be the solution. Further, if you want to embed directly in your app, use the SDK - https://blog.openziti.io/the-zrok-sdk. Today we only have for Golang; Python and NodeJS/Javascript coming soon. More in the pipeline.

For the latter, use OpenZiti (which zrok is built on - https://github.com/openziti). We have SDKs in Go, C, Java, NodeJS, Python, and many more.

It's all FOSS under Apache 2.0. I work on the project.

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

#264
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a beauty to engineering something having yourself as the target user, and no one else. 100%, I'm following a similar approach to you with yet another notes app solely for my own use. Have you written more about your personal project anywhere? One thing I only realised once I started building my own tools, is that you become - from day one - an unmatched world-class expert in using that tool. This seems obvi…

> Have you written more about your personal project anywhere? No, I've had plans to create a blog to write about it or make a YouTube video, but haven't come to it yet. > One thing I only realised once I started building my own tools, is that you become - from day one - an unmatched world-class expert in using that tool This is something that I've also realized - a lot of times when we interact with software we kinda…

> But when you write your own software, you have a map of everything in your head, and you don't have to guess what exactly a button does, how it does it or where you need to go to do that.

Absolutely! It's quite a unique experience. When I started out it felt like I might just be wasting time and reinventing the wheel but in retrospect it was absolutely a good time investment!

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

#265
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similarly, albeit with much less effort, I configured (neomutt) into the most beautiful and best, rapid UX mail client ever. I use it at work and for private purposes. People are impressed when looking at it. A handful of them asked for the config. Don't think any one ever got used to it.

What about SSO? Sadly, none of the terminal-based email clients I tried supported this, but since you said you use this at work, maybe it supports SSO login to your work email?

So far I only use IMAP

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

#266
post #50
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similarly, albeit with much less effort, I configured (neomutt) into the most beautiful and best, rapid UX mail client ever. I use it at work and for private purposes. People are impressed when looking at it. A handful of them asked for the config. Don't think any one ever got used to it.

How did you configure neomutt? I mostly have the default configuration, with some other tweaks I've forgotten about (like changing mailboxes using a function key). What am I missing out?

I will take a screenshot once I'm on my laptop (in a day or two)

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

#267
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similarly, albeit with much less effort, I configured (neomutt) into the most beautiful and best, rapid UX mail client ever. I use it at work and for private purposes. People are impressed when looking at it. A handful of them asked for the config. Don't think any one ever got used to it.

please share this, I'd like to check it out

https://github.com/kmARC/dotfiles

It's already shown on the screenshot, but I'll get a better one soon.

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

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a beauty to engineering something having yourself as the target user, and no one else. 100%, I'm following a similar approach to you with yet another notes app solely for my own use. Have you written more about your personal project anywhere? One thing I only realised once I started building my own tools, is that you become - from day one - an unmatched world-class expert in using that tool. This seems obvi…

> For me, my notes app is now used as my personal knowledge base, project management tool, todo list, daily planning tool and for journalling. Because I built it, I'm extremely effective at using it - and it's lean and fast - only with the features that I know I need. Hey same! What inspired you? Anything you would be willing to share about it? For me, I used a different notes app which I liked, and wanted to learn a…

Evernote originally inspired me (back in the day) as to the value of having some sort of personal knowledge management tool.

More recently Obsidian inspired me in terms of showing me what a non-enshittified, open/portable format note-taking experience could be like. And the beauty of simple Markdown notes!

Through the Obsidian community I discovered the concepts of Zettelkasten / Second Brain etc. and was further convinced of the usefulness of regular note taking and storing/synthesising of reference knowledge.

But I found Obsidian slightly mismatched with my requirements. Primarily because there was certain functionality I needed which can only be achieved with plugins, but I didn't consider their plugin security model to be sufficient enough for storing my most confidential data - even with everything being local files. (That and the lack of open source was enough to make me nervous).

My app is written in pure Javascript, heavy use of web components, running in Electron. No Node.js (apart from what Electron is precompiled with) - so no third-party dependencies as part of my code, and Electron is heavily locked down. I have a lightweight build step using Esbuild (a single rust binary).

Being 100% native JS - no frameworks - and quite lightweight, the app is indistinguishable from a native macOS app in terms of responsiveness! Knowing that may not always be the case, I'm also eyeing up Tauri as a potential alternative GUI "wrapper".

As a .NET developer by day I would have liked to have built it in MAUI but found that to be quite lacking for my purposes.

I've started to write a blog article about it with some screenshots - I"ll eventually get around to publishing it!!

How about you? What did you write your backend in and did that escalate into the front-end too?

The CalDav idea is very interesting... you've got me thinking about that.

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

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a beauty to engineering something having yourself as the target user, and no one else. 100%, I'm following a similar approach to you with yet another notes app solely for my own use. Have you written more about your personal project anywhere? One thing I only realised once I started building my own tools, is that you become - from day one - an unmatched world-class expert in using that tool. This seems obvi…

I did two yet another notes apps, one including a custom P2P sync backend, All abandoned for Google Keep, but it was definitely interesting. Ever so often I think about trying again, which I might in fact do if Keep ever becomes paid or stops working well or anything like that, or battery-free Bluetooth gets cheap and common and I decide to integrate inventory tracking features.

The P2P sync sounds cool.

> Ever so often I think about trying again,

I think if you enjoy the process and the result is useful to you, then it's definitely worth trying again!

I don't know about you, but I always learn a hell of a lot through my personal projects too. They've almost always been a good investment of time for me.

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

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a beauty to engineering something having yourself as the target user, and no one else. 100%, I'm following a similar approach to you with yet another notes app solely for my own use. Have you written more about your personal project anywhere? One thing I only realised once I started building my own tools, is that you become - from day one - an unmatched world-class expert in using that tool. This seems obvi…

I’ve made a poll/group decision making app for my family and friends, and i’m this close to starting some sort of collaborative note/list making app because apple notes causes us so many headaches

Do it!!
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