9 ms·

Using your phone as a software development platform

56 points by polterguy1001 4y ago

soulofmischief 4y ago
> we’ll throw in hosting for you because we’re nice guys. This literally allows you to use your phone as a software development platform. Turn down the millennialspeak just a bit... I watched the demo, and it doesn't mention how this product scales. Who exactly is the audience here? What kind of services do you envision being built with Aista?
- koenvdb 4y ago
  > Turn down the millennialspeak just a bit... Sounds like you're a boomer! /s I had the exact same question. I don't see myself coding from my phone, because typing on a on-screen keyboard is just awful.
- datavirtue 4y ago
  I left the site after reading that bit of text, and I will never look back.
teddyh 4y ago
Or, alternatively: https://puri.sm/posts/convergent-app-development/ https://puri.sm/posts/convergent-app-development/
grp000 4y ago
Might be useful for those living in poverty and don't have access to a PC?
- ComodoHacker 4y ago
  ...but have "€49 per month" to spend: https://aista.com/pricing/ https://aista.com/pricing/
arvigeus 4y ago
I've been looking for some way to code on my phone while I slack around away from my computer. So far the only thing working for me was CodeSandbox, but even it is very clunky and buggy.
- hbossy 4y ago
  Bluetooth keyboard and ssh client of your choice. Leave your work computer at home and ssh into it from anywhere. It works best for Vim enthusiasts, but nano is just as good.
unnouinceput 4y ago
Quote: "...and we’ll throw in hosting for you because we’re nice guys" Another walled garden? No thank you, hard pass
MrDresden 4y ago
A video demo for a mobile dev platform that is not optimized for viewing on mobile? Doesn't really give me high confidence in the actual product.
- w4ffl35 4y ago
  implies their product is weak
- pmontra 4y ago
  Yep, I came here to suggest them to change the format of that video into something that can be watched full screen on a phone without black bands on the sides.
onion2k 4y ago
I used to code NodeJS services on my phone quite a lot when I was commuting to an office. I used Termux - https://termux.dev/en/ https://termux.dev/en/. It was brilliant, and worked far better than you'd think it would. The main problem was the keyboard because the stock Android one doesn't support a lot of symbols. I solved that with https://github.com/klausw/hackerskeyboard https://github.com/klausw/hackerskeyboard.
- HPsquared 4y ago
  Folding Bluetooth keyboard, and a phone stand, turn a phone into a pretty decent terminal.
  - bobbiechen 4y ago
    I used to use the Logitech K480 for this, which is a non-folding Bluetooth keyboard with integrated phone stand. Though it was as bulky as carrying a small tablet or laptop would've been, it was still convenient - at the time my only laptop was a 17" tank.
  - tomjen3 4y ago
    At that point you need a table, right? And you have essentially just reinvented the laptop.
    - HPsquared 4y ago
      Basically unlike a laptop you don't need a bag, as the keyboard can fit in a pocket. Yes you need a table but the small folding tables trains etc are sufficient.
- a-saleh 4y ago
  Few months ago I took that one step further, I forgot my notebook at home, but realised I could just plug in my phone to the monitor (I have Samsung, and their Dex desktop think worked with our usb-c monitors) so I opened tmux and carried on with work :)
- ybc37 4y ago
emptyparadise 4y ago
I think I could make do with a self-hosted instance of https://vscode.dev https://vscode.dev on a local machine that I could browse to from my phone. I wonder if that's something that exists...
- FruitForce 4y ago
  Code-server: https://github.com/coder/code-server https://github.com/coder/code-server
  - BatteryMountain 4y ago
    I use it for work stuff. The $6 Digital Ocean droplets is enough to run it & a java compiler. All my code now lives there, local machine is basically empty. So when roaming between different networks & workstations (office, home), it's super simple. Just open up vs code and continue on. Only need ssh for it work. Oh and a stable internet connection makes a big difference.
- easton 4y ago
  The Visual Studio Code server, which literally lets you attach a real machine to vscode.dev, also exists: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/vscode-server https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/vscode-server (The proxy service is invite only, but you can host the 100% local version using serve-local)
chrismorgan 4y ago
I’m seriously confused about Aista. After https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32618797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32618797 a couple of days ago which is an absurd and utterly groundless criticism of GraphQL (and there seems to be a follow-up post now which I find even more baffling), one user there suggested the whole thing was trolling, and looking through a handful of other articles on that site I became more inclined to accept that the whole was a parody because so many of them are so extreme to the point of absurdity and caricature, and that the product almost epitomises some of the sorts of problems the articles are complaining about, and various other popular insanities in the software world (like inventing yet another pseudo-declarative probably-mostly-imperative programming language in YAML—so passé). But… there also looks to be an awful lot of work gone into it, and it seems like it’s actually a real thing, that people use to do real stuff? And you have articles like this that seem serious and realistic? I just don’t understand what’s going on. Yours sincerely, Honestly Confused
- kalcode 4y ago
  The way that company has posted blog where they seem to have complete lack of understanding what graphql is and their comments on dev.to show a huge amount of disrespect. The blogs posts comments themselves shows the company's author of these seems dense, rude and unknowledgeable in what they argue. Which also means their product they are making is likely being made by the same mindset. Definitely wouldn't trust them. It seems also like a ploy to get attention, which is definitely gonna keep me away from their product. Seriously, check out these comment section. It's like they posted about something they have no clue about and then are gonna defend it to their grave regardless if they are wrong. Wait until some security flaw comes out and this attitude makes them unwilling to admit they are wrong. Gross. https://dev.to/polterguy/oop-a-software-development-mass-psychosis-9n4 https://dev.to/polterguy/oop-a-software-development-mass-psy... https://dev.to/polterguy/graphql-is-a-hot-smoking-pile-of-garbage-141g https://dev.to/polterguy/graphql-is-a-hot-smoking-pile-of-ga...
  - ShamelessC 4y ago
    > Even if that was true, the above is 7 lines of code. That is 3.5 times as many LOC as my 2 liner. Science shows us that the amount of resources required to maintain code is proportional to the LOC count. Your example is hence 3.5 times more demanding in both initial resources to create it and resources required to maintain it. One of OOP's sales pitches was "that it makes it easier to maintain your code". You just scientifically proved it wrong ... I think it has to be trolling, right? I haven't seen mention of LOC as a useful metric since the oughts.
FruitForce 4y ago
Can’t bang the drum loud enough for how good Gitpod is. If you’re a Gitlab user it’s baked right into the services too: https://www.gitpod.io/ https://www.gitpod.io/ Makes jumping on multiple branches super useful right from an device as portable as a iPad or iPhone.
- jonas-w 4y ago
  Looks very good, i hope there will be support for gitea!
- zeroxp 4y ago
  Gitpod is a wonderful thing. I find myself reaching for that more and more, the whole ephemeral workspace concept is really fabulous.
- MrDresden 4y ago
  Your comment seems completely unrelated to the topic at hand.
  - FruitForce 4y ago
    It’s another great way of using your phone as a full software development platform.
palcu 4y ago
Hijacking the article, but has somebody managed to find a good iPhone/iPad keyboard for coding? I’m still able to do Python with the default keyboard, but I press a lot of times the symbol key. The Wolfram Alpha custom keyboard on Android is absolutely the best keyboard for coding.
- tigerlily 4y ago
  FWIW I travel with a Keychron K3
personjerry 4y ago
Lot of advertisements disguised as blog entries on HN recently
samwillis 4y ago
Somewhat off topic war story time. About five years ago I was in hospital with appendicitis the day before Black Friday. We had a promotion set to run on our online store starting at midnight UK time (where we are). We are a tiny company, literally my wife, myself (the only tech) and at the time one other none technical employee. Fortunately, I thought, everything was ready to go, specific promotion code read to automatically run at midnight, so wasn’t too worried about being out of action. Having been waiting all day I was finally sent down for surgery at 8pm, I was quite a low priority case. I vaguely remember waking up in recovery and being wheeled back to the ward. At just before midnight we are about to go live with the promotion so I take a quick look at the site and all is running fine. 12.00 ticks rounds, refresh the site, it’s gone, error 500, damn! I had overlooked something and broken the site just before the biggest proportion of the year. Somehow, and I don’t fully remember, I manage to fix it from my phone. We host on Heroku, and my dev environment is on my laptop at home. I had a Digital Ocean VM sitting unused, but with key based auth only. I somehow manage to install a ssh client on my phone, grab the key from my password manager. Login and install the full dev environment (Python venv, Postgres, Node, Heroku CLI), debug and patch the code. And finally push the fix to Heroku. I have no idea how long it took, I was certainly still fuzzy from the general anaesthetic, but I got it fixed! I now ensure I always have a dev environment installed on a vm, and access setup from a ssh client on my phone. It’s certainly possible to do software development, the traditional kind, from your phone, but I don’t recommend it.
- polterguy1001 4y ago
  We've got an IDE that is fully functioning on your phone. You can edit code directly in production with it, assuming you want to do that ofc. Not sure I'd encourage you to actually do it, but it IS possible :)
crabmusket 4y ago
> Creating an app with Aista implies selecting properties using checkboxes, select dropdown lists, and high level UI components – Implying it’s equally easy to use your phone to create your apps, as using your desktop machine The use of "implies" (twice!) in this paragraph seems very non-idiomatic to me.
- w4ffl35 4y ago
  I thought this was odd as well.
- smoe 4y ago
  Caught my eye as well, it seems that they just really like that word. If you search on Google for "implies site:aista.com" you get 7 pages of results.
w4ffl35 4y ago
Scratch, for apps. No thanks.
polterguy1001 4y ago
Hi guys and gals, thx for the confidence. Just wanted to let you know the product is open source, so there are no "walled gardens" here :) As to my use of "imply", I'll change my language :D English is my second language, and I should probably install Grammarly or something on my machine ;)
asyncapiabuse 4y ago
I would say that using your primary communication device as a development platform is a not good idea.
yummybear 4y ago
IMO, there is something going on here. Besides the large amount of inflaming articles published by aista, a lot of ... interesting articles show up when you google the people involved, if you go down that rabbit hole: Company Information https://opencorporates.com/companies/cy/HE428124 https://opencorporates.com/companies/cy/HE428124 Rants https://emalm.com/?v=gCuwY https://emalm.com/?v=gCuwY Matches partner name from company information: https://www.kyivpost.com/article/content/ukraine-politics/chernovetskys-son-in-law-suprunenko-put-on-interpo-102956.html https://www.kyivpost.com/article/content/ukraine-politics/ch...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
forgotpwd16 4y ago
This is just an ad for their product which provides a mobile interface.
seba_dos1 4y ago
> However, using your phone to create a web app is probably something you haven’t seen before. About a year ago I have used my phone as an actual software development platform, writing a jam game in C with Allegro using Qt Creator as my IDE and bunch of other tools like GIMP and LMMS, by connecting the phone to an external display, keyboard and mouse: https://tins.amarillion.org/2021/log/entrant/4236 https://tins.amarillion.org/2021/log/entrant/4236 Also, many years ago I've been using my Neo Freerunner to develop bunch of Python code using nothing but its touchscreen, but I'm too old for that now ;)
polterguy1001 4y ago
Psst, at yo'all, one thing you're kind of like missing here, is that besides from the Angular compilation process, the video is in real time - During these 4 minutes, I'm producing apprx. 2,000 lines of backend code, and some 25,000+ lines of frontend Angular code ... ... just sayin' ... ;)
- soulofmischief 4y ago
  no doubt a lot of work went into this, I'm really curious if you've done any benchmarking w/ size and performance?
  - polterguy1001 4y ago
    It's about 1.5 times slower than pure async ADO.NET using IConnection and IDataReader, implying (duh! :D) it's about 5 times faster than Python and twice as fast as PHP. As to memory, we're running our cloudlets on "dust" basically, still they perform better than the average PHP solution deployed into 10x as much HW. It's also async to the core, implying it's probably about one order of magnitude better on throughput per HW compared to PHP and Python, possibly more. To understand why, realise it's just a tiny abstraction on top of .Net version 6. Implying we've got almost the same traits in regards to performance as .Net 6.

56 points by polterguy1001 4y ago

> we’ll throw in hosting for you because we’re nice guys. This literally allows you to use your phone as a software development platform. Turn down the millennialspeak just a bit... I watched the demo, and it doesn't mention how this product scales. Who exactly is the audience here? What kind of services do you envision being built with Aista?

koenvdb 4y ago
> Turn down the millennialspeak just a bit... Sounds like you're a boomer! /s I had the exact same question. I don't see myself coding from my phone, because typing on a on-screen keyboard is just awful.
datavirtue 4y ago
I left the site after reading that bit of text, and I will never look back.

teddyh 4y ago

Or, alternatively: https://puri.sm/posts/convergent-app-development/ https://puri.sm/posts/convergent-app-development/

grp000 4y ago

Might be useful for those living in poverty and don't have access to a PC?

ComodoHacker 4y ago
...but have "€49 per month" to spend: https://aista.com/pricing/ https://aista.com/pricing/

arvigeus 4y ago

I've been looking for some way to code on my phone while I slack around away from my computer. So far the only thing working for me was CodeSandbox, but even it is very clunky and buggy.

hbossy 4y ago
Bluetooth keyboard and ssh client of your choice. Leave your work computer at home and ssh into it from anywhere. It works best for Vim enthusiasts, but nano is just as good.

unnouinceput 4y ago

Quote: "...and we’ll throw in hosting for you because we’re nice guys" Another walled garden? No thank you, hard pass

MrDresden 4y ago

A video demo for a mobile dev platform that is not optimized for viewing on mobile? Doesn't really give me high confidence in the actual product.

w4ffl35 4y ago
implies their product is weak
pmontra 4y ago
Yep, I came here to suggest them to change the format of that video into something that can be watched full screen on a phone without black bands on the sides.

onion2k 4y ago

I used to code NodeJS services on my phone quite a lot when I was commuting to an office. I used Termux - https://termux.dev/en/ https://termux.dev/en/. It was brilliant, and worked far better than you'd think it would. The main problem was the keyboard because the stock Android one doesn't support a lot of symbols. I solved that with https://github.com/klausw/hackerskeyboard https://github.com/klausw/hackerskeyboard.

HPsquared 4y ago
Folding Bluetooth keyboard, and a phone stand, turn a phone into a pretty decent terminal.
- bobbiechen 4y ago
  I used to use the Logitech K480 for this, which is a non-folding Bluetooth keyboard with integrated phone stand. Though it was as bulky as carrying a small tablet or laptop would've been, it was still convenient - at the time my only laptop was a 17" tank.
- tomjen3 4y ago
  At that point you need a table, right? And you have essentially just reinvented the laptop.
  - HPsquared 4y ago
    Basically unlike a laptop you don't need a bag, as the keyboard can fit in a pocket. Yes you need a table but the small folding tables trains etc are sufficient.
a-saleh 4y ago
Few months ago I took that one step further, I forgot my notebook at home, but realised I could just plug in my phone to the monitor (I have Samsung, and their Dex desktop think worked with our usb-c monitors) so I opened tmux and carried on with work :)
ybc37 4y ago

emptyparadise 4y ago

I think I could make do with a self-hosted instance of https://vscode.dev https://vscode.dev on a local machine that I could browse to from my phone. I wonder if that's something that exists...

FruitForce 4y ago
Code-server: https://github.com/coder/code-server https://github.com/coder/code-server
- BatteryMountain 4y ago
  I use it for work stuff. The $6 Digital Ocean droplets is enough to run it & a java compiler. All my code now lives there, local machine is basically empty. So when roaming between different networks & workstations (office, home), it's super simple. Just open up vs code and continue on. Only need ssh for it work. Oh and a stable internet connection makes a big difference.
easton 4y ago
The Visual Studio Code server, which literally lets you attach a real machine to vscode.dev, also exists: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/vscode-server https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/vscode-server (The proxy service is invite only, but you can host the 100% local version using serve-local)

chrismorgan 4y ago

I’m seriously confused about Aista. After https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32618797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32618797 a couple of days ago which is an absurd and utterly groundless criticism of GraphQL (and there seems to be a follow-up post now which I find even more baffling), one user there suggested the whole thing was trolling, and looking through a handful of other articles on that site I became more inclined to accept that the whole was a parody because so many of them are so extreme to the point of absurdity and caricature, and that the product almost epitomises some of the sorts of problems the articles are complaining about, and various other popular insanities in the software world (like inventing yet another pseudo-declarative probably-mostly-imperative programming language in YAML—so passé). But… there also looks to be an awful lot of work gone into it, and it seems like it’s actually a real thing, that people use to do real stuff? And you have articles like this that seem serious and realistic? I just don’t understand what’s going on. Yours sincerely, Honestly Confused

kalcode 4y ago
The way that company has posted blog where they seem to have complete lack of understanding what graphql is and their comments on dev.to show a huge amount of disrespect. The blogs posts comments themselves shows the company's author of these seems dense, rude and unknowledgeable in what they argue. Which also means their product they are making is likely being made by the same mindset. Definitely wouldn't trust them. It seems also like a ploy to get attention, which is definitely gonna keep me away from their product. Seriously, check out these comment section. It's like they posted about something they have no clue about and then are gonna defend it to their grave regardless if they are wrong. Wait until some security flaw comes out and this attitude makes them unwilling to admit they are wrong. Gross. https://dev.to/polterguy/oop-a-software-development-mass-psychosis-9n4 https://dev.to/polterguy/oop-a-software-development-mass-psy... https://dev.to/polterguy/graphql-is-a-hot-smoking-pile-of-garbage-141g https://dev.to/polterguy/graphql-is-a-hot-smoking-pile-of-ga...
- ShamelessC 4y ago
  > Even if that was true, the above is 7 lines of code. That is 3.5 times as many LOC as my 2 liner. Science shows us that the amount of resources required to maintain code is proportional to the LOC count. Your example is hence 3.5 times more demanding in both initial resources to create it and resources required to maintain it. One of OOP's sales pitches was "that it makes it easier to maintain your code". You just scientifically proved it wrong ... I think it has to be trolling, right? I haven't seen mention of LOC as a useful metric since the oughts.

FruitForce 4y ago

Can’t bang the drum loud enough for how good Gitpod is. If you’re a Gitlab user it’s baked right into the services too: https://www.gitpod.io/ https://www.gitpod.io/ Makes jumping on multiple branches super useful right from an device as portable as a iPad or iPhone.

jonas-w 4y ago
Looks very good, i hope there will be support for gitea!
zeroxp 4y ago
Gitpod is a wonderful thing. I find myself reaching for that more and more, the whole ephemeral workspace concept is really fabulous.
MrDresden 4y ago
Your comment seems completely unrelated to the topic at hand.
- FruitForce 4y ago
  It’s another great way of using your phone as a full software development platform.

palcu 4y ago

Hijacking the article, but has somebody managed to find a good iPhone/iPad keyboard for coding? I’m still able to do Python with the default keyboard, but I press a lot of times the symbol key. The Wolfram Alpha custom keyboard on Android is absolutely the best keyboard for coding.

tigerlily 4y ago
FWIW I travel with a Keychron K3

personjerry 4y ago

Lot of advertisements disguised as blog entries on HN recently

samwillis 4y ago

Somewhat off topic war story time. About five years ago I was in hospital with appendicitis the day before Black Friday. We had a promotion set to run on our online store starting at midnight UK time (where we are). We are a tiny company, literally my wife, myself (the only tech) and at the time one other none technical employee. Fortunately, I thought, everything was ready to go, specific promotion code read to automatically run at midnight, so wasn’t too worried about being out of action. Having been waiting all day I was finally sent down for surgery at 8pm, I was quite a low priority case. I vaguely remember waking up in recovery and being wheeled back to the ward. At just before midnight we are about to go live with the promotion so I take a quick look at the site and all is running fine. 12.00 ticks rounds, refresh the site, it’s gone, error 500, damn! I had overlooked something and broken the site just before the biggest proportion of the year. Somehow, and I don’t fully remember, I manage to fix it from my phone. We host on Heroku, and my dev environment is on my laptop at home. I had a Digital Ocean VM sitting unused, but with key based auth only. I somehow manage to install a ssh client on my phone, grab the key from my password manager. Login and install the full dev environment (Python venv, Postgres, Node, Heroku CLI), debug and patch the code. And finally push the fix to Heroku. I have no idea how long it took, I was certainly still fuzzy from the general anaesthetic, but I got it fixed! I now ensure I always have a dev environment installed on a vm, and access setup from a ssh client on my phone. It’s certainly possible to do software development, the traditional kind, from your phone, but I don’t recommend it.

polterguy1001 4y ago
We've got an IDE that is fully functioning on your phone. You can edit code directly in production with it, assuming you want to do that ofc. Not sure I'd encourage you to actually do it, but it IS possible :)

crabmusket 4y ago

> Creating an app with Aista implies selecting properties using checkboxes, select dropdown lists, and high level UI components – Implying it’s equally easy to use your phone to create your apps, as using your desktop machine The use of "implies" (twice!) in this paragraph seems very non-idiomatic to me.

w4ffl35 4y ago
I thought this was odd as well.
smoe 4y ago
Caught my eye as well, it seems that they just really like that word. If you search on Google for "implies site:aista.com" you get 7 pages of results.

w4ffl35 4y ago

Scratch, for apps. No thanks.

polterguy1001 4y ago

Hi guys and gals, thx for the confidence. Just wanted to let you know the product is open source, so there are no "walled gardens" here :) As to my use of "imply", I'll change my language :D English is my second language, and I should probably install Grammarly or something on my machine ;)

asyncapiabuse 4y ago

I would say that using your primary communication device as a development platform is a not good idea.

yummybear 4y ago

IMO, there is something going on here. Besides the large amount of inflaming articles published by aista, a lot of ... interesting articles show up when you google the people involved, if you go down that rabbit hole: Company Information https://opencorporates.com/companies/cy/HE428124 https://opencorporates.com/companies/cy/HE428124 Rants https://emalm.com/?v=gCuwY https://emalm.com/?v=gCuwY Matches partner name from company information: https://www.kyivpost.com/article/content/ukraine-politics/chernovetskys-son-in-law-suprunenko-put-on-interpo-102956.html https://www.kyivpost.com/article/content/ukraine-politics/ch...

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

forgotpwd16 4y ago

This is just an ad for their product which provides a mobile interface.

seba_dos1 4y ago

> However, using your phone to create a web app is probably something you haven’t seen before. About a year ago I have used my phone as an actual software development platform, writing a jam game in C with Allegro using Qt Creator as my IDE and bunch of other tools like GIMP and LMMS, by connecting the phone to an external display, keyboard and mouse: https://tins.amarillion.org/2021/log/entrant/4236 https://tins.amarillion.org/2021/log/entrant/4236 Also, many years ago I've been using my Neo Freerunner to develop bunch of Python code using nothing but its touchscreen, but I'm too old for that now ;)

polterguy1001 4y ago

Psst, at yo'all, one thing you're kind of like missing here, is that besides from the Angular compilation process, the video is in real time - During these 4 minutes, I'm producing apprx. 2,000 lines of backend code, and some 25,000+ lines of frontend Angular code ... ... just sayin' ... ;)

soulofmischief 4y ago
no doubt a lot of work went into this, I'm really curious if you've done any benchmarking w/ size and performance?
- polterguy1001 4y ago
  It's about 1.5 times slower than pure async ADO.NET using IConnection and IDataReader, implying (duh! :D) it's about 5 times faster than Python and twice as fast as PHP. As to memory, we're running our cloudlets on "dust" basically, still they perform better than the average PHP solution deployed into 10x as much HW. It's also async to the core, implying it's probably about one order of magnitude better on throughput per HW compared to PHP and Python, possibly more. To understand why, realise it's just a tiny abstraction on top of .Net version 6. Implying we've got almost the same traits in regards to performance as .Net 6.