CardStock[0] isn’t mentioned in this article, but seems broadly similar in goals and approach to Scrappy. Unlike Scrappy (so far as I can tell) CardStock is open-source and can be run locally.[1]
Decker[2] (which is also open-source) has answers to several of the things outlined on Scrappy’s roadmap, including facilities for representing and manipulating tabular data with its query language and grid widgets and the ability for users to abstract collections of parts into reusable "Contraptions".
I think it's a great demo, it is interesting how harsh the feedback is that you are getting. You are probably just too late to the party.
I also work in this space and the road ahead gets exponentially harder, unfortunately.
al_borland · 1h ago
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.
bandoti · 40m ago
It seems the way to go would be to open source the SaaS code to ensure that longevity. The folks at Penpot have a good thing going with that—most people will use the SaaS offering but it’s available for self-hosting.
One of the difficulties of course is notarizing/signing the apps and so-forth. Perhaps some Web3 solutions could help as well.
OR, another option would be like what PICO-8 does (or flash I guess)—release the runtime and distribute the “carts” or apps. :)
Still, it’s pretty complex creating a trusted distribution network outside of SaaS. Definitely could work though it’s been done before!
I was also thinking back to when I used TiddlyWiki almost 20 years ago. If this tool is effectively just HTML, CSS, and Javascript... could they bake it all into a single HTML file. Download a template, design your app offline, and save your work to a file that can run on its own, offline, in a browser window. Maybe the about of JS they need to bake in, or images, would make that impractical.
Of course, as it stands, the examples were so simplistic that they could easily be vibe coded. I just tried it with the attendance counter and ChatGPT gave me that's only 50 lines. I'm sure I could make that much shorter doing it manually. Granted, a project like this has to start somewhere, but as it stands it's adding a lot of infrastructure without adding enough value to make it worth it, when AI is pretty good at these really basic things, like "give me a text box with a button to increment it".
tokioyoyo · 5h ago
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 zero financial gains from it.
OP is right, making simple apps for your friends for fun!
bryantt · 4h ago
This sounds great, could you link the app please?
tokioyoyo · 1h ago
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.
dewey · 4h ago
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.
dewey · 57m ago
Yea that’s the idea. Worked well for the years where I tried it.
drchaos · 3h ago
Not OP, but https://dawarich.app/ seems to do the same (open source and self-hostable, also has an iOS App).
brador · 2h ago
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.
tokioyoyo · 53m ago
Fair point, but as I grew up, I realized those things really don’t matter to me. My thought process was — oh, I walk around a lot, I’m curious how much of the city I’ve covered -> oh, there’s no free app for that -> oh, I’ve never made an iOS app and this looks simple -> let’s spend a week making it and share it with friends.
As a side note, as I grew up, I realized I genuinely don’t care about the walled garden flame wars, and things alike. Life is pretty simple, I’d rather walked around a new neighbourhood and grab a pint.
collingreen · 1h ago
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!
nilirl · 5h ago
It's nice but I've yet to see a more usable end-user programming environment than the spreadsheet.
schwartzworld · 1h ago
No tests, no version control, no library support. Pass for me.
nilirl · 1h ago
You're making the argument that end-user programming must have the same priorities as professional software development.
thunspa · 3h ago
Or learning to actually code. I can't see why I would ever learn to use these kinds of tools.
As a developer, I can just make it myself. Now with LLMs, if it's very simple and bounded, I can just vibe most of it with very little to lose.
As a lay person, I don't see what the TAM for this is. Who will spend the time to learn how to drag and drop an application?
feeley · 2h ago
An alternative to Scrappy is the free CodeBoot web app (https://codeboot.org), which allows you to create web apps in Python that are fully encapsulated in a URL. No installation is required—neither for the developer nor the user. Below is an example of a math practice app with simple user interaction through dialogs. To create a web app URL, right-click the "play" button and choose the type of link you want to generate.
For more complex UIs, CodeBoot provides an FFI for accessing the DOM directly from Python code. For example here is a dice throwing app with a button to roll the dice again. The text in the button has translations to multiple languages and will adjust to the browser's default.
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].
I am vibe coding a hobby project to find out what's the state of things.
I've found that every few hours I get stuck on an issue that the LLM can't solve and a user with no programming experience would have little hope to crack it either.
I suppose this issue might depend on technology and scope of the project.
physicsguy · 3h ago
It's got a bug, if you enter a non-integer like 3 + 2 = 5.1 then it marks that as correct
aitchnyu · 2h ago
Whats your simple system stack, preferably self hostable? I may choose Vue, need auth, a multiplayer offline DB, static hosting, file hosting and preferably filter rows by users (dont allow me to see others data if I fiddle with the api).
melagonster · 5h ago
You are right. They are the natural opponents of vibe coding. vibe coding is from a funny X post; this is the OG purpose.
_joel · 1h ago
except it's broken
4ndrewl · 1h ago
Vibe coding seems to be synonymous with "sort of works, bunch of bugs"
heyyfurqan · 1h ago
love the Comic Sans in here
riffraff · 6h ago
I am 100% behind the idea of "scriptable components" vs block-based programming for beginners.
I'm on mobile now but I'll try this on desktop ASAP.
But I think one thing missing on the analysis is: people want ease of share and zero cost.
It's surprisingly simple to build a minimal app in some environments but then you get to distribution (app store are a huge gatekeeper) and/or hosting and e.g. my wife or kids won't be bothered to pay 5$/momth for it (and neither will many professional devs).
DougN7 · 6h ago
You could self host with your OS’s web server and a dynamic DNS service pointing to your home computer.
franga2000 · 5h ago
Except the OS has no web server, so you have to find and install one, make sure it auto starts, set up port forwarding (which you might not be able to if you're behind CGNAT or your ISP just doesn't let you)... Then you need to explain to your partner that your computer is running 24/7 to host your shared shopping list or whatever, which will definitely cost more in electricity than a 5$/mo VPS, which was already presumed to be unacceptable
vincnetas · 5h ago
"... my wife or kids " you already lost them at "... self host"
abcd_f · 5h ago
GP was suggesting that you would self-host for your wife and kids, not that they would self-host themselves.
stevoski · 6h ago
Sadly, free hosting or distribution for fun ideas like this one leads to bad actors abusing the service.
funnym0nk3y · 1h ago
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?
mettamage · 38m ago
Oh haha, I simply program little apps for my friends to solve their problems. I thought this would be about that
indyjo · 3h ago
So you drag UI elements onto an empty sheet, fight with the grid snap (because it doesn't match the size of your UI elements) and are then supposed to enter raw JavaScript, without any code completion, visual programming, API help or AI support? And that's it?
blips · 3h ago
"We believe computers should work for people, and dream of a future where computing, like cooking or word processing, is available to everyone."
generic...
"with live updating — all for free. LLMs ar..." also see a fair few of these long dashes (18x) which is either a tell tail of you've used ChatGPT to generate the text or you've started writing like the AI.
I havn't thought about it that hard yet but i don't really like consuming AI generated content at all as soon as i see signs of it part of my brain turns off. And no slight to the creator, I have as much interest in writing this kind of copy as any developer would i'd imagine.
ben_w · 3h ago
> "with live updating — all for free. LLMs ar..." also see a fair few of these long dashes (18x) which is either a tell tail of you've used ChatGPT to generate the text or you've started writing like the AI.
It's also my IRL writing style for the last 10-15 years :P
That said:
> I havn't thought about it that hard yet but i don't really like consuming AI generated content at all as soon as i see signs of it part of my brain turns off.
Likewise.
At least, when someone else did the prompting — I do like what LLMs can output, but when LLM answers are sufficient I prefer to cut out the middle-man and ask the LLM directly myself.
Hendrikto · 2h ago
If you read up on hyphens VS en-dashes VS em-dashes, using em-dashes is actually the correct usage — as a separator — in the case you cited.
I disagree with your conclusion of this being a telltale sign of being AI generated.
hiAndrewQuinn · 3h ago
You can make an awful lot of useful little tools with an LLM, vanilla JavaScript, GitHub Pages, and the user's own localStorage as a semi-persistence layer. Two 9s and cross-platform to boot.
Recently I made a diet checklist [1] that I've been following more or less to the letter 5 days out of the week. I have a little Android button that just opens right up to the web page. I click, click, click, then move on with my day. If I feel I need to change something I can copy a plain text screenshot of what's on there currently and chat with Gemini about it.
+1 over this. As someone without a deep technical background, LLMs enabled me to improve my life unimaginably, being able to quickly sketch and develop small features that remove every day annoyance.
fuzztester · 2h ago
examples?
zigman1 · 1h ago
My very first thing was automation of placing my journal entry to appropriate Google Drive folder. I write my brain dump/journal everyday in Google Docs, and if I just click "New document, it places it in the root GDrive folder, and I had to move it manually which I am to lazy to do it.
LLM helped me write a python script that searches the root folder, finds the right document (name is always the date of the day), and searches for the right folder in assigned Google Drive repository (and creates a yearly or monthly folder if a new month starts).
It also helped me create a yaml script for Github actions to trigger this once every day.
I felt like a magician. Since then I created second brain databases, internal index of valuable youtube videos, where I call the api to get transcripts and send it to llm, other note taking automations etc etc
mikedelfino · 2h ago
I came here to say exactly this. You can even set up build steps using GitHub Actions if you prefer something beyond vanilla JS, or publish the project for free on Cloudflare, even from private repositories. In addition to localStorage, IndexedDB is also very useful. It's easy to export the app’s data as JSON for better persistence, and you could store it on Google Drive or a similar service.
s_ting765 · 5h ago
Cool but no link for the source code negates entire point of sharing apps.
abcd_f · 5h ago
It absolutely doesn't.
swyx · 4h ago
> All Scrappy apps are multiplayer, like a Google Doc is. You can even edit them while they are being used by someone else!
ok where is the scrappy backend? what data do you see? where do i make an account? i wish that this was more transparent/discussed since obviously this software is not entirely local?
> LLMs are getting better and better, and while they are far from able to make a full-fledged app without a lot of help from a software engineer, they can make small apps pretty reliably.
mildly disagree. llm generated apps tend to look better + i dont have to learn or stick to your preset primitives. even nontechnical people run into this pretty quickly
otherwise, nice labor of love. good going OP.
Peteragain · 4h ago
I feel we are coming at this as programmers, and the opportunity is the community aspect. What about starting with the family run app stores? Masterson style.
No security (you're all friends right) and no way to contribute without an invite. Just a thought.
jackgavigan · 5h ago
I love the concept. I think the trick to being successful with a project like this is cracking the user experience in a way that makes it powerful enough to be truly useful, while keeping it simple enough that a child can build (scr)apps (c.f. Super Mario Maker).
Making it possible to lookup and store data in a spreadsheet (maybe using something like the Google Sheets API) could unlock a huge amount of use cases.
I'll be watching this project with interest!
account-5 · 4h ago
> You drag objects out on the canvas — a button, a textfield, a few labels. Select an object, and you can modify its attribute in an inspector panel. Certain objects, like buttons, has attributes like “when clicked” that contain javascript code.
Swap JavaScript with VBA and this is the MS Access workflow.
I'd only start using this if it became ooensource though, can find anything to suggest it is.
lastdong · 5h ago
Google Studio IO apps seems like a step in the same direction. Now if only we could host it on github and take advantage of static github pages.
In the future, optimised open models will enable more people to develop tools locally, and with an open source AIDE (does this term exist yet? Artificial Intelligence Development Environment) publish / share it in different ways.
filcuk · 4h ago
Just trying this out and it appears in Firefox, the drag & drop handle on new elements doesn't cover the whole rectangle, just the label.
jayd16 · 6h ago
I guess this fits into the Google Forms, SharePoint space?
croniev · 6h ago
I like the idea! Now you're just left with the dilemma of what happens when you reach many people with it - will Scrappy be made for thousands of users, polished and flashy?
atemerev · 6h ago
So, just like Delphi?
(I wonder if somebody ported Delphi / Lazarus to WASM)
elric · 5h ago
I was going to call this "a less-feature rich Delphi without Borland's corporate greed", but then I noticed that Delphi is apparently still alive (somehow?). Delphi was one of my earliest programming experiences in the 90s. Blast from the past.
atemerev · 5h ago
Yes, it is still alive, it still works great, and if you want something open source, there's Lazarus which is nearly as good.
bowsamic · 6h ago
I would if Apple didn’t put such tight restrictions against hobby app creation
InsideOutSanta · 6h ago
I often create small apps like these for my friends, but 100% of them are written in PHP and plain HTML with some JavaScript. They need to be built quickly, deployed quickly, updated quickly, run on every device, and be runnable by sending a link on WhatsApp.
So it doesn't matter what Apple does because I'm never going to put something like that into any App Store.
bowsamic · 5h ago
Well the reason why you are having to use a web browser rather than sharing the app written using native APIs is because Apple forces you to use the App Store, so you yes did matter what Apple does. They prevent you from using the native toolkit and your use of the browser is partly a workaround for that
EDIT also Apple are in full control of what functionality they expose in their web APIs so even then it matters hugely
jimbob45 · 4h ago
iPhone Shortcuts can get you surprisingly far. I agree that building hobbyist apps has too high of an entry barrier in the Apple ecosystem but Shortcuts handles CRUD stuff with ease.
_joel · 1h ago
Hypercard vibes
sReinwald · 2h ago
The core vision here is something I can absolutely get on board with, but the execution fundamentally seems to misunderstand why "home-cooked software" doesn't exist.
The target audience problem is immediately apparent: they're building a product for people who can write JavaScript event handlers but somehow can't 'npx create-react-app'. This demographic is approximately twenty-seven people.
More critically, they've confused the problem space, in my opinion. The barrier to personal software isn't the lack of drag-and-drop of JavaScript environments. It's that software, unlike a meal or a home-made sweater, comes with an implicit support contract that lasts forever. When I cook dinner for friends, I'm not on the hook when they're hungry again next Tuesday. When my grandma knits a home-made sweater, she's not expected to keep supporting it in case I want to add a hood.
When the attendance counter has a race condition and the venue goes over capacity, guess who's getting the angry call when the fire marshal shows up for an inspection?
The "redistributing the means of software production" rhetoric rings particularly hollow from what appears to be a proprietary SaaS in the making. You don't democratize software by creating another walled garden. And their claim about "owning your data" while simultaneously offering real-time sync is either technically naive or deliberately misleading. How is the attendee counter example's counter state shared between users, if the data lives in local storage? I don't see how you can have both without server infrastructure that they control.
The actual nearest thing to their vision already exists and has millions of users: Spreadsheets. Non-technical people build complex, business-critical "applications" in spreadsheets every day. No JS required, local-first, and everyone already knows how to use it. But "we made a worse Excel" doesn't sound as revolutionary, I suppose.
The real unsolved problem isn't making it easier to create small apps - I build small tools for myself all the time. It's making them sustainable without creating permanent maintenance burdens. And that is not something you can solve with a new framework or SaaS - it's at it's core, a social issue.
EZ-E · 5h ago
Very nice. For me, LLM fills that niche when I need to build something very small. Just built a dumb tiny flashcard webapp (literally a standalone index.html) because I was tired of apps either being either overly complex for my simple use case, or asking me to register/pay/see ads.
ceving · 4h ago
Where does the data go?
jwblackwell · 4h ago
This is just crying out for AI to help you get started.
amelius · 1h ago
I use AI for getting started in everything nowadays.
1. Start up the app
2. Try dragging a block
3. Doesn't work
_nice_
carabiner · 5h ago
I don't have friends so this has no use for me
em-bee · 1h ago
you could build things for yourself and share them here
richarlidad · 6h ago
I love this.
demaga · 4h ago
I agree with the title, but not with the article. I expected to see something like how you can make your friends and family lives easier using your skills as a software developer.
From time to time I come up with micro-projects that solve very particular issues my friends are facing. Ones that are not easily solved with existing apps on the market. When I see my friends use them, it brings me joy!
But! For this I had to use traditional software development tools I was already familiar with - IDE, source control, etc. Scrappy or similar tools would not help me at all. The tool is targeting someone like my non-developer friends, but I doubt they could come up with a design for a solution, implement it in scrappy and then maintain it when something changes in the outside world.
On a separate node, I had great success with spreadsheets as both Frontend and sometimes Backend in various personal projects. And I'm not the only one, my friend made an addon for Google Sheets that pulls data from my specific bank's API - I use it to track my expenses. That's the kind of stuff I wanted to see in the article.
franciscop · 2h ago
Same thing here, one of my first open source projects was to read a public Google sheet to pull the data, both from the frontend and backend. While Google killed the api that made it possible so I deprecated it, it still holds a precious place in my memories as one of the most collaborative projects I've ever made
Decker[2] (which is also open-source) has answers to several of the things outlined on Scrappy’s roadmap, including facilities for representing and manipulating tabular data with its query language and grid widgets and the ability for users to abstract collections of parts into reusable "Contraptions".
[0] https://cardstock.run
[1] https://github.com/benjie-git/CardStock
[2] http://beyondloom.com/decker/index.html
I also work in this space and the road ahead gets exponentially harder, unfortunately.
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.
One of the difficulties of course is notarizing/signing the apps and so-forth. Perhaps some Web3 solutions could help as well.
OR, another option would be like what PICO-8 does (or flash I guess)—release the runtime and distribute the “carts” or apps. :)
Still, it’s pretty complex creating a trusted distribution network outside of SaaS. Definitely could work though it’s been done before!
[1]: https://penpot.app/
[2]: https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php
Of course, as it stands, the examples were so simplistic that they could easily be vibe coded. I just tried it with the attendance counter and ChatGPT gave me that's only 50 lines. I'm sure I could make that much shorter doing it manually. Granted, a project like this has to start somewhere, but as it stands it's adding a lot of infrastructure without adding enough value to make it worth it, when AI is pretty good at these really basic things, like "give me a text box with a button to increment it".
OP is right, making simple apps for your friends for fun!
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.
As a side note, as I grew up, I realized I genuinely don’t care about the walled garden flame wars, and things alike. Life is pretty simple, I’d rather walked around a new neighbourhood and grab a pint.
As a developer, I can just make it myself. Now with LLMs, if it's very simple and bounded, I can just vibe most of it with very little to lose.
As a lay person, I don't see what the TAM for this is. Who will spend the time to learn how to drag and drop an application?
https://app.codeboot.org/5.3.1/?init=.fbWF0aF9wcmFjdGljZS5we...
For more complex UIs, CodeBoot provides an FFI for accessing the DOM directly from Python code. For example here is a dice throwing app with a button to roll the dice again. The text in the button has translations to multiple languages and will adjust to the browser's default.
https://app.codeboot.org/5.3.1/?init=.fZGljZS5weQ==~XQAAgADq...
[1] https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/bb451732-9559-401a-8000-b...
I've found that every few hours I get stuck on an issue that the LLM can't solve and a user with no programming experience would have little hope to crack it either.
I suppose this issue might depend on technology and scope of the project.
I'm on mobile now but I'll try this on desktop ASAP.
But I think one thing missing on the analysis is: people want ease of share and zero cost.
It's surprisingly simple to build a minimal app in some environments but then you get to distribution (app store are a huge gatekeeper) and/or hosting and e.g. my wife or kids won't be bothered to pay 5$/momth for it (and neither will many professional devs).
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?
generic...
"with live updating — all for free. LLMs ar..." also see a fair few of these long dashes (18x) which is either a tell tail of you've used ChatGPT to generate the text or you've started writing like the AI.
I havn't thought about it that hard yet but i don't really like consuming AI generated content at all as soon as i see signs of it part of my brain turns off. And no slight to the creator, I have as much interest in writing this kind of copy as any developer would i'd imagine.
It's also my IRL writing style for the last 10-15 years :P
That said:
> I havn't thought about it that hard yet but i don't really like consuming AI generated content at all as soon as i see signs of it part of my brain turns off.
Likewise.
At least, when someone else did the prompting — I do like what LLMs can output, but when LLM answers are sufficient I prefer to cut out the middle-man and ask the LLM directly myself.
I disagree with your conclusion of this being a telltale sign of being AI generated.
Recently I made a diet checklist [1] that I've been following more or less to the letter 5 days out of the week. I have a little Android button that just opens right up to the web page. I click, click, click, then move on with my day. If I feel I need to change something I can copy a plain text screenshot of what's on there currently and chat with Gemini about it.
I'm really liking this new wave of technology.
[1]: https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/diet-checklist/
LLM helped me write a python script that searches the root folder, finds the right document (name is always the date of the day), and searches for the right folder in assigned Google Drive repository (and creates a yearly or monthly folder if a new month starts).
It also helped me create a yaml script for Github actions to trigger this once every day.
I felt like a magician. Since then I created second brain databases, internal index of valuable youtube videos, where I call the api to get transcripts and send it to llm, other note taking automations etc etc
ok where is the scrappy backend? what data do you see? where do i make an account? i wish that this was more transparent/discussed since obviously this software is not entirely local?
> LLMs are getting better and better, and while they are far from able to make a full-fledged app without a lot of help from a software engineer, they can make small apps pretty reliably.
mildly disagree. llm generated apps tend to look better + i dont have to learn or stick to your preset primitives. even nontechnical people run into this pretty quickly
otherwise, nice labor of love. good going OP.
Making it possible to lookup and store data in a spreadsheet (maybe using something like the Google Sheets API) could unlock a huge amount of use cases.
I'll be watching this project with interest!
Swap JavaScript with VBA and this is the MS Access workflow.
I'd only start using this if it became ooensource though, can find anything to suggest it is.
In the future, optimised open models will enable more people to develop tools locally, and with an open source AIDE (does this term exist yet? Artificial Intelligence Development Environment) publish / share it in different ways.
(I wonder if somebody ported Delphi / Lazarus to WASM)
So it doesn't matter what Apple does because I'm never going to put something like that into any App Store.
EDIT also Apple are in full control of what functionality they expose in their web APIs so even then it matters hugely
The target audience problem is immediately apparent: they're building a product for people who can write JavaScript event handlers but somehow can't 'npx create-react-app'. This demographic is approximately twenty-seven people.
More critically, they've confused the problem space, in my opinion. The barrier to personal software isn't the lack of drag-and-drop of JavaScript environments. It's that software, unlike a meal or a home-made sweater, comes with an implicit support contract that lasts forever. When I cook dinner for friends, I'm not on the hook when they're hungry again next Tuesday. When my grandma knits a home-made sweater, she's not expected to keep supporting it in case I want to add a hood.
When the attendance counter has a race condition and the venue goes over capacity, guess who's getting the angry call when the fire marshal shows up for an inspection?
The "redistributing the means of software production" rhetoric rings particularly hollow from what appears to be a proprietary SaaS in the making. You don't democratize software by creating another walled garden. And their claim about "owning your data" while simultaneously offering real-time sync is either technically naive or deliberately misleading. How is the attendee counter example's counter state shared between users, if the data lives in local storage? I don't see how you can have both without server infrastructure that they control.
The actual nearest thing to their vision already exists and has millions of users: Spreadsheets. Non-technical people build complex, business-critical "applications" in spreadsheets every day. No JS required, local-first, and everyone already knows how to use it. But "we made a worse Excel" doesn't sound as revolutionary, I suppose.
The real unsolved problem isn't making it easier to create small apps - I build small tools for myself all the time. It's making them sustainable without creating permanent maintenance burdens. And that is not something you can solve with a new framework or SaaS - it's at it's core, a social issue.
_nice_
From time to time I come up with micro-projects that solve very particular issues my friends are facing. Ones that are not easily solved with existing apps on the market. When I see my friends use them, it brings me joy!
But! For this I had to use traditional software development tools I was already familiar with - IDE, source control, etc. Scrappy or similar tools would not help me at all. The tool is targeting someone like my non-developer friends, but I doubt they could come up with a design for a solution, implement it in scrappy and then maintain it when something changes in the outside world.
On a separate node, I had great success with spreadsheets as both Frontend and sometimes Backend in various personal projects. And I'm not the only one, my friend made an addon for Google Sheets that pulls data from my specific bank's API - I use it to track my expenses. That's the kind of stuff I wanted to see in the article.