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

robinsloan.com

281–290 of 296 posts

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

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we're still entertaining the above analogy, a home kitchen costs more than a PC with a 3090/4090. But when I got into software in the 90s, it was about $4000 for just a run of the mill desktop PC, which is about $8000 in today's money. And it didn't even have 3d acceleration. In the grand scheme of things, a 3090/4090 is not expensive.

A gas camping stove is like $50. A toaster oven is another $50-100. The best reviewed chefs knife on the market for commercial kitchens is $30. You don’t need thousands of dollars to start cooking. I have friends in the who cook on this stuff at home all the time. We in the west have elevated our kitchens into something luxurious. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s overkill for many people.

You can get started with cooking on a gas camping stove like you can get started with AI projects on a Coral Edge TPU accelerator.

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

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://umami.recipes

LOVELY. I have a boatload of feature creep ideas for you to reject... Shall I post them here, or DM you? - This is an app logic that works for more than just cooking - but a big thing is OCR a hand written recipe from familial cookbooks... I still have my mothers, as well as hand written recipes from my grandmother, their friends, etc. Take a pic of a recipe, OCR if can - else host the pic? -- However, an interesting…

> I have a boatload of feature creep ideas for you to reject... Shall I post them here, or DM you?

Ha! Either, or feel free to email me at jeff@umami.recipes.

> Take a pic of a recipe, OCR if can

The app actually has an OCR recipe importer (tap "Add Recipe" > "Scan Recipe"). It uses Apple's native iOS OCR library, which inserts text directly from the camera.

It doesn't support importing from an existing photo yet though -- that's high up on my list to build (after Android).

> else host the pic?

You can upload photos for recipes!

> However, an interesting aspect of the "recipe" app logic is that it can apply to, say, mechanics

That's a really good point. I bet much of the underlying functionality could be re-used in a completely different app focused on something like mechanics. Another example I've thought about is a separate app specific to cocktail recipes, with features tailored around mixology and bar management.

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

#283
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…

same here would love to hear what is the uique twist yours has or see a screenshot. for me its people centrism.

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

#284
post #25

Lovely idea. I’ve been thinking of “small scale web things” a lot recently, as I’ve been growing more and more tired of the planet scale web. I live in a small village in Canada and it would be nice to have something “village scale” that is only of interest, and as such perfectly adapted to only our village. Because it’s so small scale (we’re only a couple thousand), it can run on something in my closet. If it goes d…

I'm trying to get as many people I know onto Meshtastic as possible. $25 hardware, no central server(I quite like not having home servers to maintain!), no ham licence, phone-based control. Eventually, of course, I'd like to do Some Really Cool Project with it beyond the default functionality, but I have no idea what.

I never heard of Meshtastic. Looks very interesting. Going to read up on it for sure, thanks for sharing!

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

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The trouble is, making a useful app takes so much work, that it feels more like a second full time job than an enjoyable process...

Especially getting things to both sync across devices and load instantly on Android is definitely not trivial.

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

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 con…

Ah obsidian... I feel it's a very common tool. There's a whole pile of clones/related projects too (LogSeq, Roam, etc).

What kind of functionality were you looking for? I've found that once I controlled my notes, the amount of things I wanted to dump into it kept growing.

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

I started using TiddlyWiki, and really like their approach to content (small notes, composable content, the "river" of notes as you click through links). You can add metadata (KV style) to the notes, which you can use in the markdown, which is quite powerful. The tool is meant to be "in browser" and you're supposed to save the whole HTML source when you make an edit. For me, I wanted a traditional CRUD interface to a server. They support that, but the developer isn't really focusing on it. So I wrote my own because I had a few weeks and wanted to play more with Golang.

My only gripe, and the reason I'm considering writing a new front end (which will be a big learning activity for me), is that TW doesn't support 'lazy loading'. very well, so if you have a massive amount of notes, it gets a little wonky. I discovered the issues with this when on plane WiFi and getting issues with overwriting instead of editing notes.

But once I had a CRUD API for my notes... I started going crazy. I can import photos, and link to them (pretty basic) but I can also push emails, calendar events, etc. I set up a browser plugin that lets me automatically take notes on any webpage, and adds tags/metadata to the note. The limit is now the front-end which is where I'll probably spend 2024...

I also had the idea of integrating with HomeAssistant, so the device's history was viewable in a 'note' about the device (dynamically generated from a template instead of static text from DB). Possibly with camera events as their own entry... Lots of things are possible once you control where the data comes from.

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

#289
post #176

I love seeing whenever this is (re)posted. This article had such a huge impact on my life and led to me creating many pieces of software[1][2][3] that were hyper-specific to myself and my needs at the time, which also later found an audience in others who think and work in ways similar to me. [1]: https://notado.app - a "content-first" internet bookmarking and highlighting service which has been my second brain since…

Thanks for sharing about your projects (especially notado and kuli.sh), I would never have heard about it if it weren't for this comment.
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