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

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

#31

Post by liamN »

personjerry wrote: post #24
n3t wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't free apps a conflict of interest then? I can imagine that a good platform for making "home-cooked apps" would be beneficial both to Apple and to buyers of their products. I believe Shortcuts was a move in the right direction.

> Aren't free apps a conflict of interest then? They are indeed, I think. When was the last time you saw a really great free app? That was at the beginning of the App Store ecosystem, I think they've moved away from it.

Arent all the best/popular apps free these days? I have no data to back this up, but in my experience people have gotten less willing to pay money for an app than when the app stores launched (presumably because everyone is used to "free" apps that you pay with your data to use).

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

#32

Post by p1nkpineapple »

In my family home growing up, me and my sister had our bedrooms upstairs while the dining/living rooms were downstairs. When it was dinner time, my mother would yell out "Dinners ready!" up the staircase - often to deaf ears, as us young teens were pre-occupied with loud music, gaming or talking on the phone.

After coming down one-to-many times to a cold dinner, I developed my first "app" with MIT App Inventor - Dinners Ready, an app with three buttons: "kid A", "kid B", and a larger "Both". Pressing a button would send a simple text message saying dinner is ready.

My mum loved it. Suddenly she didn't have to worry about fruitlessly yelling to her distracted kids. I wouldn't have to rely on my grumbling stomach to come downstairs to an empty dining table with my food going cold. We used it for years, and she still brings it up from time to time. To this day it remains my most well-reviewed app with 100% happy users.

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

#33

Post by mickgardner »

I just wanted to say that this article fits with my personal experience so well, so refreshing. I love messing with code and different technologies, but mostly I really only want to please myself or family members with my creations. To be relieved of the need to feel professional in my endeavour is enlightening.

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

#34

Post by blairfrandeen »

smcin wrote: post #6
blairfrandeen wrote: post #4

Wow, this article hits home. Recently my wife and I were admiring the full moon, and she wondered aloud how many moons we'd been together and said, "maybe you should use your programming stuff to find out." A month later I surprised her with a home cooked Android app called RacoonMoon. It features a random picture of us, and along with some very cheesy love messages and inside jokes, says how many moons we've been to…

Awesome. Can you give a lightning talk on that? Me and lots of others would be interested.

Sure, sounds fun. This entire thread is very inspiring.

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

#35

Post by mackatap »

blairfrandeen wrote: post #4

Wow, this article hits home. Recently my wife and I were admiring the full moon, and she wondered aloud how many moons we'd been together and said, "maybe you should use your programming stuff to find out." A month later I surprised her with a home cooked Android app called RacoonMoon. It features a random picture of us, and along with some very cheesy love messages and inside jokes, says how many moons we've been to…

Godot would be great for this kind of thing. Super easy android development

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

#36

Post by benj111 »

I find it interesting that I seem to have a different takeaway from most of the other commenters here.

I assume HN is dominated by professional programmers? Id assume the reactions would be different in a demoscene or raspberry pi forum?

For me this is what I like about open source software. It's a home cooked meal that the chef has shared. It's not trying to please every one, it's written by the author for the author.

Both activities have creative elements, and a "what happens if" element. And I can certainly see the sharing motivation for both.

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

#37

Post by InitialBP »

trblw wrote: post #13
horsawlarway wrote: post #10

Really resonates with my recent experiences. I want off the software equivalent of the fast food menu - crap designed to bring in the most revenue for the least expense, user health and preferences be damned. I've already started replacing a lot of the "as a service" software I used with self-hosted equivalents. The next one I really want to hit is "family chat" since Apple is still making a mess of it for folks with…

> family chat Please build this! I have a large family with a mix of android and ios users, ages 18 to 80. We end up using long running text message threads as an ad-hoc social network, with people posting pictures, links, updates, comments, etc., and things get disorganized because discussions are not threaded. I would love "reddit for families" -- for lack of a better description. Threaded discussion with easy "pos…

Just to play devils advocate, what if you just made a private subreddit for your family?

While I also struggle with the android/apple divide in my family I feel like getting them all to agree to use an existing social platform would be exceptionally difficult, but it would be orders of magnitude easier than getting them to use a custom or relatively unknown app for comms unless it did something really special or novel.

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

#38

Post by zach_garwood »

I made a micro-journaling web app that has three total users (my mother, my friend, and me), and only one weekly active user (me): https://joyjar.zachgarwood.com

It looks kinda goofy and wouldn't hold up to a large userbase, but it was fun to write, and it's nice to have something that does exactly and only what I want it to do.

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

#39

Post by horsawlarway »

InitialBP wrote: post #37
trblw wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> family chat Please build this! I have a large family with a mix of android and ios users, ages 18 to 80. We end up using long running text message threads as an ad-hoc social network, with people posting pictures, links, updates, comments, etc., and things get disorganized because discussions are not threaded. I would love "reddit for families" -- for lack of a better description. Threaded discussion with easy "pos…

Just to play devils advocate, what if you just made a private subreddit for your family? While I also struggle with the android/apple divide in my family I feel like getting them all to agree to use an existing social platform would be exceptionally difficult, but it would be orders of magnitude easier than getting them to use a custom or relatively unknown app for comms unless it did something really special or nove…

So at least in my case -

I have a couple of problems with outsourcing this kind of thing like that.

Namely - a private subreddit would work but comes with a LOT of downsides.

- Ads (this is pretty much a dealbreaker on it's own...)

- Signup

- Changing UI/UX

- Lack of control over uploads/content (who backs it up, when, how?)

- Lack of control over the general experience

The nice thing about custom software is that as long as the user count is low, and it's family that you trust, you can ditch a LOT of the pain points of online software.

ex: who needs signup/login when I can just embed a shared key?

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

#40

Post by vineyardmike »

mariodiana wrote: post #11

> In a better world, I would have built this in a day, using some kind of modern, flexible HyperCard for iOS. > > 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. Are you listening, Apple?

The UI front still has a long way to go but I found that Shortcuts in iOS has some pretty powerful abilities if you know what you’re doing.

My partner and I have a shortcut for “what floor is the car on” since the car is parked in a neighboring garage without assigned spots. We have a shared note and the shortcut appends a line with the date and floor on it. A second shortcut will read the last line of the note and parse the floor and present it.

Shortcut hacks we found:

- parse text from a shared note. Remember scaling is a non-issue.

- there is a “ssh to a server” shortcut option to trigger python scripts or background tasks (or home assistant, etc)

- edit on mac app

- iOS major updates break things :(

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