My most popular application
136 points by frontsideair
136 points by frontsideair
Wow, the world is a small place. I made the exact same app for my wife who has a chronic illness as well. She wanted a way to track events simply. So I made https://www.simplecalendartracker.com/. My wife helped me design it with wire frames.
It is unusually popular. There are 100 daily active users. But I am embarrassed, I rushed this app to finish it before the birth of my son (around 5-6 years ago). The code is awful. In my “wisdom” I chose to not store email addresses so now you can’t retrieve passwords. But it works.
And my wife still uses it, so my number one customer is happy I am happy.
If we had known about yours, I probably wouldn't build it. But I'm happy that I built it anyway. (Can relate to the "awful code" part!)
Writing software for people you know and care about is a wonderful practice. Surprisingly, this isn't as common as one would think. After all, coding is a craft, so why wouldn't we craft bespoke things for our family!
For me, it's the iOS app store. I have never published an iOS app but have heard stories that it's an expensive, annoying process. This is secondhand and likely outdated, so take it with a grain of salt.
I don't have an Android phone - don't know if it's any easier there.
That's exactly why I opted to build it on the web. (As a sibling comment points out, local storage and web manifest.) App stores are expensive and you have to ask for permission to put it up there. (Android is easier and cheaper, but it's still not a great experience, and we both have Apple devices.)
The word "app" heavily implies mobile app, but I insist on using it on web apps. We can claim it!
This is just a website using local storage and a manifest so it works offline. Equally easy on any platform.
I believe you can share apps with a limited number of people via TestFlight without publishing on the App Store. Not sure if this still requires notarization, which costs money.
This is very sweet.
I've wanted to take a stab at making bespoke applications that fit into our lives, too. Nothing has quite stuck since the problems I like to solve most are developer-oriented, but this is making me open my mind again. :)
Go for it! I made myself a programming calculator. It displays signed decimal, unsigned decimal, hexadecimal, octal and binary at the same time (five different output fields), and I can select 8, 16, 32 or 64 bit output. It has the standard +, -, * and /, but it also has AND, OR, XOR, negate, complement, shift and byte-swapping operations. All the math is integer math.
I encourage you to do it! It doesn't have to be perfect, just useful to someone you care about (or yourself)!
Looks like the app uses localStorage. One issue I ran into with that approach is that (at least in the past) iOS Safari would delete that data if you ran low on space or if you didn't visit the web site for some number of days. Considering all the trouble iOS lcoalStorage gave me, I'm surprised to hear that the data survived a phone upgrade!
Are there any better options for simple persistent storage these days?
The contract between the web app developer and the browser is that local storage is not guaranteed to be kept, so it's reasonable to be cautious, even in this day and age. That's partially why I added import/export functionality. (Also I wanted to avoid data loss during a schema migration.)
For persistent storage, Sandstorm comes to mind. I haven't used it before, but has been around for a long time and seems to be actively maintained.
Yes, import/export was my solution as well, but it requires manual work, so I’m hoping someday we get something better (opt-in, of course, since otherwise it would be abused for tracking). I wish remoteStorage had caught on…
There is CloudKit JS, if you want to be integrated into Apple world. But keeping it very simple, I’ve seen several offline web apps that let you OAuth them into a cloud storage service you already have (Dropbox, etc.) so they can make copies there as a backup. Some even attempt multi-device sync this way, which can be quite challenging, I imagine.
As Czechs say, "the blacksmith's mare and the shoemaker's wife often walk barefoot".
It's always nice when it's not the case.
This is awesome. I just did a similar thing, my mom just had a stroke, and I needed an app to show current date and time and her next calendar event. I also added a place for messages, so people can send little messages to her.
It's just a laptop connected to a TV that is on 24/7, but it works very well for it's purpose for over a month now.. Those of us involved in her care have a shared nextcloud calendar.
It's not complicated. I use Postgres and pg_timetable and python.
This is great. Not everything needs to be an app - web-apps work just as well for a large subset to use cases and are portable, even between desktop and mobile.
I made a similar app to myself! It can track your mood, and you can also add stickers to your day log, sort of like a physical journal.
I also support a bunch of other things that used to be spread out:
And categories for everything + a global search.
Both your links say 'Content not available in your region.'; don't suppose you have a blog, repo or some other place where you have this written up? I'd be interested in having a look :)
I have wanted an app like this for a while, except that I want them to be emoji “stickers” I apply to dates when I’ve ridden my bike, cleaned the cat box, etc.
Ooh that's a good idea! (The only problem would be adding counters on emoji, but they can be used for once-per-day things.) Feel free to send a PR, or fork if you prefer that?
This is adorable! Technical stuff aside (I don't know anything about mobile apps so I didn't bother checking the code), the idea of writing a custom program for your loved ones is so, so sweet. I'll be stealing this idea!
Go for it! The best part is that it's a progressive (offline) web app so it's cross platform and no app store fees involved!
I made a few small applications for my dad using AppleScript and Racket a while back. The one he's used the most would basically scan one directory tree, find all the lossless audio files, and then mirror the directory tree to another root and convert the audio files using ffmpeg. It was written in Racket using racket/gui and less than 300 lines of code in total. He'd use it to load up a USB stick with music to listen while driving. Every now and then he'd tell me that he was still using it.