3 ms·
Because some of the requirements and solutions are so niche as to appear invented. It’s not parody and appears earnest, but deeply specific to this one individu
by hnbear 2y ago
Because some of the requirements and solutions are so niche as to appear invented. It’s not parody and appears earnest, but deeply specific to this one individual.
Examples:
“I believe that a phone should offer very reliably just these features:
Calls
SMS
E2E encrypted foss IM
Deep sleep and push notifications (or any alternative for notifications without draining the battery”
Very few people outside of HN would agree with this. A phone is currently the primary computing device for the vast majority of people.
And for radio:
“Just add some streaming addresses to a simple script.”
Podcasts: “ I listen to podcasts. Sometimes. With a modified version of the sxmo_rss.sh script.”
A staggeringly small population want to handle their radio and podcast listening by just editing a small script.
Even a lot of the HN crowd want an easier life than script editing to solve these sorts of needs.
- wildzzz 2y agoI'm not exactly the most hip when it comes to using my phone but I sure as shit don't want to be pasting m3u streams and RSS feeds into a script I'm modifying on my phone. Typing on a phone is already awful so typing anything other than prose is even more awful. I very much enjoy supporting developers that make quality apps that don't spy on me and give me the level of control I desire. I could write my own apps to do what I want but writing shell scripts on a phone sounds like a step backwards. This feels like retro computing on some ancient wearable computer from the 90s.
- jasaldivara 2y agoI assume those scripts are edited on a regular desktop/laptop computer and then uploaded to the phone
- fsflover 2y agoOr you can do it by connecting a keyboard and a screen to the phone.
- jauntywundrkind 2y agoI'm less interested in nit picking specifics of what someone did & bad mouthing their efforts as irrelevant. Like, yeah, fine, this isn't for everyone (but I think it would be very interesting for me if it was also a phone too). Right now almost no one has the option to build what works for them. The phone is incredibly burdensome environment with tons of top down control that constantly bounds what we might do, and requires its own special libraries & tools to get started on. The story here is humble & simple. But it's doing for oneself, using sensible straightforward & common computing options adapted from the rest of the computing world. It's a tale of what Barefoot Developers could be doing on mobile, about one of many worlds that could be springing up, if we weren't encumbered with such stodgy narrow controlling limited platforms. https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software