[HN Gopher] An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)
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An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)
Author : jsomers
Score : 149 points
Date : 2022-09-11 15:35 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.robinsloan.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.robinsloan.com)
| sailorganymede wrote:
| Home cooked apps FTW! It's honestly such a joy to program stuff
| for you and the people you love and remove the expectation of it
| doing well in some arbitrary market
| lycos wrote:
| Hah, I once worked at a startup that tried to pivot to basically
| this almost immediately after this article was originally posted
| and the CEO read it, needless to say it didn't work out.
|
| But it is fun to sometimes program something small like this for
| yourself (and friends/family), without having to think about the
| many things you would think about in a business environment. If
| you can let go of those mental constraints, that is. I recently
| made a little mobile remote control app for my e-ink picture
| frame and the code is terrible. Everyone who sees it is impressed
| and it works without any issues 90% of the time, took me about a
| day and I get happy every time I use it.
| pxeger1 wrote:
| (The article is not really about that app, but anyway...)
|
| This is also pretty close to what BeReal is, which has seen
| huge success as a startup. I wonder what the difference was
| that made it work.
| gerad wrote:
| I was surprised that it was Robin Sloan the author who did this -
| building an app of that sophistication is no mean feat for
| someone who's not a professional.
|
| His books are excellent. I highly recommend both Penumbra's 24
| Hour Book Store and Sourdough.
| umangsh wrote:
| I really enjoyed the article. I've several personal apps, and as
| with home cooked meals, I've a favorite 'home-cooked app' that I
| iterate on more than others.
|
| Famnom evolved from spreadsheets, to python scripts, to a web-
| only django app hosted locally, to a web + ios + android client
| apps. I find it useful daily, and it has a few other regular
| users (besides my family), though arguably my family are my
| toughest users :).
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _An app can be a home-cooked meal_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22332629 - Feb 2020 (130
| comments)
| avg_dev wrote:
| I very much enjoy this post. My first introduction to Robin Sloan
| was via the novel Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. It featured
| Ruby programming as a central part of the plot. Ruby! Programming
| languages, and coding, in a novel? What a wonderful thing to
| find. I wish him great success.
| blairfrandeen wrote:
| 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 together. It barely works, and she loves
| it. We are the only two users.
|
| I wrote the app in Python and ported it to Android using Kivy,
| which was not an easy or straightforward process. It seemed to be
| the best way given that I didn't want to take the time to learn
| Java or Kotlin, but if I were to do it over maybe I'd bite the
| bullet.
| becquerel wrote:
| That's a wonderful gift.
| smcin wrote:
| Awesome. Can you give a lightning talk on that? Me and lots of
| others would be interested.
| joshstrange wrote:
| I wonder how he handles TestFlight's 90-day limit before a build
| expires. I'd probably just setup a GitHub Action to run every 1-2
| months (to give some buffer if something goes wrong) to push a
| "new" build.
|
| Sidenote, Lambda/DynamoDB/S3 (and maybe cloudfront) is a really
| nice little stack to work with for one-off projects like this.
| I've used it a couple times now for small seasonal/burst-y
| projects and it's always been a joy to use. It doesn't always
| scale (as in larger codebase) great unless you put in the work
| but for a handful of "endpoints" with storage (S3) and data
| (DynamoDB) bucket it's very nice and dirt cheap.
| rchaud wrote:
| Would be interested to know how long such an app could exist on
| the App Store. Apple is not fond of apps that are rarely updated.
| teleclimber wrote:
| I'm hoping PWAs continue to get better so that app stores
| aren't the only way of having an app-like experience. App
| stores just aren't designed for this kind of use case, and
| hurdles like "We're dropping your app bc you only have 4
| users"* take the joy out of home-coding.
|
| * fictional quote but it wouldn't shock me if it became real
| binkHN wrote:
| I have a similar story. I had an itch about improving my
| communications and scratched it. My biggest issue was the App
| Store itself and I documented my start at
| https://medium.com/@mtc.dev/my-first-android-app-story-331c9....
| fredley wrote:
| I have several 'home-cooked' apps. One is our shopping list. I
| have a Pi with a touchscreen in the kitchen running it, and it's
| easy for us both to add to from there. I also built in
| functionality so that if we're using a recipe from the web, we
| can share it to the screen, which is neat.
|
| We can also access the shopping list on our phones while
| shopping. I built a feature that sorts the products by aisle
| (specific to our local supermarket), making it easier to do the
| shop easily/quickly.
|
| I'm sure there are commercial (not even paid neccessarily) apps
| that do all this, but this one is used only by us and it's built
| to perfectly interact with our lives and circumstances:
|
| * Things are hard-coded that would make no sense in a publicly
| available app, or would be very difficult to build customisation
| for. Hardcoding things is easy, building UI is hard. We're so
| used to building things in the commercial space for scale we
| forget how easy it is to build small things that will never need
| to scale beyond a userbase of 1-2.
|
| * It has remained almost entirely unchanged in UI and features
| for ~10 years now. Can you say that of any other piece of
| software you use on a daily basis?
| teleclimber wrote:
| > I'm sure there are commercial (not even paid necessarily)
| apps that do all this, but this one is used only by us and it's
| built to perfectly interact with our lives
|
| There is another factor you may not be aware of: shopping apps
| are juicy targets for acquisition by marketing/data mining
| company. I mean, there is no clearer indication of what you
| want to buy than what you put in your shopping list, so it's
| perfect source of data to mine.
|
| Out of milk is such an example: it was a good app with 5
| million users, then it got sold. Users became the subjects of
| data mining, or their account got deleted (if in Europe). Fun!
|
| https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/inmarket-acquires-o...
|
| https://twitter.com/JamesLiamCook/status/1407370148349198341
| jxramos wrote:
| wow that app is taking a nosedive in the reviews https://play
| .google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.capigami.o...
|
| I've been curious if the play stores etc of the world would
| mind supporting some kind of banner or other notification for
| when apps change hands between owners. Something to tip them
| off to the fact that the app is now under new management,
| much like how restaurants hang banners when new management
| takes over a spot. Now that I think about it I wonder why
| restaurants even feel it warranted to notify the public, must
| have some positive image optimism behind it I guess or is it
| something regulated perhaps?
| jxramos wrote:
| > it's built to perfectly interact with our lives and
| circumstances:
|
| this is it right here! I've been contemplating getting an old
| Android tablet just to run some home-cooked app. Would be nice
| if iOS devices could support side loading of apps, but I'm cool
| having an Android device just for running these focused apps
| and that alone.
| pxeger1 wrote:
| I've tried various note taking apps and never found one that
| worked how I liked. I now use a Dropbox folder full of plain text
| files and a handful of Python scripts. I've never published them,
| they're full of hard-coded values that only I use, and they lack
| 90% of features in most note-taking systems. The simplicity works
| for me, and that's great.
| mariodiana wrote:
| > 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?
| kmeisthax wrote:
| The "modern flexible HyperCard" would be something like Swift
| Playgrounds today. SwiftUI might have all sorts of problems for
| building large apps or getting very specific with UI design,
| but it absolutely excels for building "informal apps".
|
| Only problem is that there's no iOS version. :/
| gaterin wrote:
| A common person isn't able to do what the author did, meaning
| they'll have to reach for the app store. Conveniently, Apple
| gets a cut of sales on the app store. The conflicts of interest
| are clear.
| n3t wrote:
| 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.
| personjerry wrote:
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| rchaud wrote:
| Apple doesn't care.
|
| To paraphrase Steve Jobs, "You're doing it wrong". Just build a
| web app.
|
| If you are paying an annual fee just for the privilege of being
| permitted to write software for Apple's platform, Apple can
| safely bet that you'll put up with the rigmarole of app
| deployment as well.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| 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 families split between
| iOS and Android. I'd been looking at the self-hosted options, and
| none of them really hit the spot - I might just bite the bullet
| and make my own.
| lwhsiao wrote:
| Perhaps not quite what you're looking for, but our family
| recently just switched to our own Zulip instance, and we've
| been loving it.
| trblw wrote:
| > 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 "posting" of
| pictures, links, and videos, with a simple interface similar to
| imessage or google messages, which everyone already knows how
| to use.
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