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?

I love this.

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).

I would if Apple didn’t put such tight restrictions against hobby app creation

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

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 guess this fits into the Google Forms, SharePoint space?

So, just like Delphi?

(I wonder if somebody ported Delphi / Lazarus to WASM)

I don't have friends so this has no use for me

Cool but no link for the source code negates entire point of sharing apps.

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

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!

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.

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!

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.

> 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 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.

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.

Where does the data go?

This is just crying out for AI to help you get started.

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.

> 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.

Ok do this apps run on IOS?

1. Start up the app 2. Try dragging a block 3. Doesn't work

_nice_

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/

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?

"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.

A very good idea.

See also: https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/

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. For more complex UIs, CodeBoot provides an FFI for accessing the DOM directly from Python code. To create a web app URL, right-click the "play" button and choose the type of link you want to generate.

https://app.codeboot.org/5.3.1/?init=.fbWF0aF9wcmFjdGljZS5we...