Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family

mendelgreenberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 82 posts

Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family

#41

Post by chabad360 »

Theodores wrote: post #37

Clearly the car was the Top Gear KIA Cee'd and you must be The Stig. We all start pet projects with the tools we know, to learn new tools along the way. Sometimes you have a nail and the hammer is the right tool for the job. However, why use just the hammer when you can just download the whole Snap On tool inventory for the same price, in both metric and weird American units? From your write up, I felt that the frame…

Hahaha. I hear you. Despite the complaining (I actually forgot to talk about the week long pain that was figuring out why tracing and telemetry would break the build), this project was a lot of fun. I went with flutter (and making a whole app) very much because I wanted something that was smoother than a PWA in actual use. I think that the feeling I was able to get the app to, was much more comfortable than what is possible to do with web apps. Perhaps next time tho I'll try something else.

Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family

#42

Post by chabad360 »

harrouet wrote: post #28

Next: "How I made one whole website to host one HN-featured blog post"

Funny story, I actually used a very AI-generated Astro template made by someone else, and it's gotten me annoyed enough that I'm now making my own from scratch. So perhaps there will be a writeup about that.

Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family

#43

Post by justbees »

Oh man! I made an app for my family too. They have an antiques/book selling business on eBay so I made an app for them to actually keep track of things as they buy them.

That was where their process was breaking down - When did we buy this? How much was it? The sort of things that are semi-difficult to keep track of when you're going to A LOT of estate sales and then basically need to enter all the stuff into a spreadsheet when you get home.

So the concept was - take pics and enter simple data as you're out and about and then export the data when you get home.

I ended up going way down some deep rabbit holes because I didn't want to host any data (my goal was to actual release the app and hosting people's shopping trips wasn't something I wanted to take on).

So it's all local storage and for sharing between family members I ended up embedding the data in a pdf that you can send in a text and then import - so if x people are at the same sale they can all add to the same "trip" at the same time and then combine the trip when they're all finished shopping.

So image and data optimization were big concerns since it's all on your phone until you export it/delete the trip.

I was a fun process until it wasn't :P

I did end up getting to 1.0 and shipping to the app store, which was really my goal -> make an app and go all the way through the process. So in that way it was a success.

Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family

#44

Post by chabad360 »

jeroenhd wrote: post #12
utopiah wrote: post #4

wow... so much yak shaving, including priceless bits like "sat with ChatGPT for a bit [...] we came up with OurCar" (I mean... how original is that, clearly powerful datacenters computing over a dump of the Internet was needed), I'm impressed. All this to avoid doing one subtraction (km before, km now) then multiplication (result times average litter/km) in your head. That's a LOT of effort to be lazy.

The log for "who took the car for how long when and did they fill it up" seems to be much more relevant. Nothing a notebook and a pencil can't fix, of course, but an app is more fun. I don't think it's laziness, I think it's an excuse to do a personal hobby project. Makes perfect sense to me.

This is very true, speeding tickets and parking tickets become very annoying to trackdown otherwise.

Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family

#47

Post by utopiah »

chabad360 wrote: post #32
utopiah wrote: post #4

wow... so much yak shaving, including priceless bits like "sat with ChatGPT for a bit [...] we came up with OurCar" (I mean... how original is that, clearly powerful datacenters computing over a dump of the Internet was needed), I'm impressed. All this to avoid doing one subtraction (km before, km now) then multiplication (result times average litter/km) in your head. That's a LOT of effort to be lazy.

Haha, that's certainly one way to see it. I really enjoyed making the app, so it was less about laziness more about an itchy trigger finger.

The process is the point, not the outcome. I have no doubt you had fun as I do "silly" things like that. Thanks for sharing.

Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family

#48

Post by utopiah »

NotMichaelBay wrote: post #39
utopiah wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW if I were to do this I'd do echo > index.html to make it available to anyone, Worldwide, for free! For the fancy version I'd make priceperlitterperkm URL parameter to make it work not just for my area. But that's like an entire additional like of code. My point being... I'd make a Web page, on app, no deployment, no tracking.

The article mentions that was proposed and no one wanted to do it. Also, alerts are terrible UX. At least put some effort into your example.

My point was precisely that no effort was needed to be usable, not that it was perfect. It's taking me longer to argue with you than making it. Again that was the point. We can endlessly make it slightly better... but then we forget why we did this in the first place, namely basic arithmetic for a dozen of people.

Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family

#49

Post by utopiah »

darkwater wrote: post #17
utopiah wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW if I were to do this I'd do echo > index.html to make it available to anyone, Worldwide, for free! For the fancy version I'd make priceperlitterperkm URL parameter to make it work not just for my area. But that's like an entire additional like of code. My point being... I'd make a Web page, on app, no deployment, no tracking.

echo > index.html to make it available to anyone, Worldwide, for free! You are conveniently leaving out that you already must have: * a server running 24/7 on the internet, paid for each month * purchased, setup and keep paying every year a domain name * configured a web server in that server, ideally with automated SSL certificate issue and renewal

Well yes I'm indeed assuming that you have :

- a place with electricity

- an Internet connection

- a computer, no matter how small (it can literally be a-cig)

which isn't true for literally every one but clearly for OP was.

You don't need a server in the cloud though, like I said a home server is enough.

Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family

#50

Post by utopiah »

chabad360 wrote: post #44
jeroenhd wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The log for "who took the car for how long when and did they fill it up" seems to be much more relevant. Nothing a notebook and a pencil can't fix, of course, but an app is more fun. I don't think it's laziness, I think it's an excuse to do a personal hobby project. Makes perfect sense to me.

This is very true, speeding tickets and parking tickets become very annoying to trackdown otherwise.

That's very risky, I imagine if someone did an infraction and they are unstrustworthy they will not log in the system. It only works if people want to collaborate.
Post reply on HN