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Scrappy – Make little apps for you and your friends

pontus.granstrom.me

61–70 of 153 posts

Re: Scrappy – Make little apps for you and your friends

#61
post #30

One of the best things that I did was spending a week making a simple app that can put all my Apple Watch walks on a single big map, then sharing it with my friends after it got published on AppStore. It's been a year since I worked on it, but I still get messages from my friends (and some random people who found it!) how they've walked through an entire city or something. Really rewarding experience, despite having…

This sounds great, could you link the app please?

Here you go — https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mapcut/id6478268682. It’s really not supposed to be super nice, but good enough to have some active users. It’s free, so have fun! Sorry for putting it behind auth gates, I was experimenting with some other features that required webservers running.

Re: Scrappy – Make little apps for you and your friends

#62
post #8

I think "vibe coding" will not replace developers in the short term, but it will be the strongest competition for such simple systems. I asked a few LLMs to make apps like these (plain HTML with embedded JS), and they got it right after a few edits. They are also visually more appealing [1]. [1] https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/bb451732-9559-401a-8000-b...

love the Comic Sans in here

Re: Scrappy – Make little apps for you and your friends

#63
post #56

One of the best things that I did was spending a week making a simple app that can put all my Apple Watch walks on a single big map, then sharing it with my friends after it got published on AppStore. It's been a year since I worked on it, but I still get messages from my friends (and some random people who found it!) how they've walked through an entire city or something. Really rewarding experience, despite having…

Just think about the thousands of useless obstacles and moats you’ve had to navigate and overcome to make that. How many millions have given up at any one of them. After all that you still control nothing and are vendor locked. Imagine if you could just AI prompt that up and simply transfer to your open source watches. What a world that would be.

Help build the world you want to see! It will take folks passionately trying to make this open, free, unmonetized vision a reality in competition with the walled gardens you're decrying. I wish you luck if you give it a go!

Re: Scrappy – Make little apps for you and your friends

#64
post #39
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds great, could you link the app please?

Not the OPs app but there's an app doing something similar that I enjoyed for many years, you can also import from GPS trackers and others: https://fogofworld.app

Does that work like a game map where the fog disappears where you have been? That would be cool, although the reviews aren't great.

Re: Scrappy – Make little apps for you and your friends

#65
post #39
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds great, could you link the app please?

Not the OPs app but there's an app doing something similar that I enjoyed for many years, you can also import from GPS trackers and others: https://fogofworld.app

I use https://wandrer.earth/ , connected to Strava

Re: Scrappy – Make little apps for you and your friends

#66
post #18

It's nice but I've yet to see a more usable end-user programming environment than the spreadsheet.

No tests, no version control, no library support. Pass for me.

You're making the argument that end-user programming must have the same priorities as professional software development.

Re: Scrappy – Make little apps for you and your friends

#69
Although I like the idea in principal, I don't see the real use case here.

Most of the examples can easily be replaced by pen and paper which is faster than building a app. More complex use cases require more complex solutions which I'm not sure this provides.

One use case could have been an application to study functions in time and frequency space. But does it provide an fft?

Re: Scrappy – Make little apps for you and your friends

#70
I like the spirit of it, but the execution isn't what I'm looking for. With this being a hosted solution, it makes me dependent on another SaaS tool for little personal projects. If it's a little counter needed for an afternoon, that's not such a big deal. However, if I'm looking for a scrappy little app I may use for years, this is a problem. Plus, no matter how low the learning curve gets, it will still exist, so I want something that I can use for the long term for things like this. This makes my mind go to approachable and easy languages that allow the user to easily throw a GUI on it. I don't think code needs to be completely abstracted away, just made easy and tailored to what people will do. Look at how many people on MySpace were able to learn some CSS. Maybe they copy and paste someone else's stuff at first, but that's the foot in the door before they eventually look at how to tweak it.

I typically end up using basic HTML/CSS/JS for stuff like this today. If I really need backend code, I'll use basic PHP (no frameworks or anything). But this ties me to a browser, which I'm not always a fan of. Some of these fairly scrappy little projects at work (done in the browser like this, and with AutoHotKey) have been going for 10+ years now, with very little maintenance. The AHK script I haven't touched in probably 8 years, since I moved to macOS at work, yet people still use it countless times per day. If AHK decides to stop operating, it's no big deal, the code that exists will still run. The same can't be said for these SaaS solution to this problem. People looking for scrappy solutions aren't looking to remake their solution every time a founder decides to move on to something else more interesting or profitable.

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