Scrappy: make little apps for you and your friends
47 points by Internet_Janitor
47 points by Internet_Janitor
CardStock isn’t mentioned in this article, but seems broadly similar in goals and approach to Scrappy.
Decker 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”.
Depressing that the authors feel the need to justify their decision not to build their neat thing on LLMs.
When everyone and anyone is trying to force LLMs into literally every tech, I can understand their preemptive messaging. I was in a work townhall this week where the execs asked the crowd if anyone was vibe coding, no one raised their hands, and they were like “really? why?” it’s so detached, but it’s what’s being driven from the top in a lot of companies.
Is the source code available? This looks really neat, but I’m loath to put any effort into building stuff with this or teaching my friends to use it if I can’t self-host it.
In particular it’s a bit of a red flag that they don’t talk about funding. If this takes off and gets a huge number of users, are the creators prepared to pay the server bills in perpetuity out of pocket?
This looks neat! Wondering if the name a reference to Lu Wilson’s (a.k.a. TodePond’s) scrappy fiddles?
The drag-and-drop approach, at least as implemented here, completely fails at making applications accessible to blind users. (Note: I’m talking about using an existing application, not developing one.) In the arithmetic practice scrap, for example, the UI elements are in completely the wrong order when using a screen reader, and it’s not clear that only one of them, the field where the user enters their answer, is supposed to be editable. There’s also no clear association between the field with the correct answer and the “correct answer” label.
I suppose one might dismiss accessibility as one of those complications that are necessary for mass-market applications, but that can be avoided for home-made apps for only one’s friends and coworkers. That’s fine, until one has a blind friend or coworker.
Yeah, just seems like an oversight in the implementation. No reason why having a GUI editor should lead to worse accessibility in theory.
I definitely see the visual basic vibes. I remember seeing visual basic on a friend’s computer and it’s what gave me the original spark to learn programming, and it’s now been my career for decades. So this is really cool to see and I’m so glad people are making things like this!
at a quick glance, it seems like a really nice tool for solving day-to-day problems through simple software. definitely invested in the concept!