Scrappy – Make little apps for you and your friends

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.

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!

[1]: https://penpot.app/

[2]: https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php

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".