Make little apps for you and your friends

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.

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".

[0] https://cardstock.run

[1] https://github.com/benjie-git/CardStock

[2] http://beyondloom.com/decker/index.html

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!

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?

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

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.

I'm really liking this new wave of technology.

[1]: https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/diet-checklist/

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...

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).

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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!