dvdsgl

Fun! :D

Before I make some caustic remarks, I’d like to say that I think pg is a curious, genuine, and beneficent person. I am not trying to troll or to be cruel, but rather to give a negative but sincere response, as contrast, in a community that tends to adulate pg.

Reading this essay was like kissing a person you didn’t know died six hours ago—you expect warmth, but instead, your vivid lips collide with a cold, bloodless, unresponsive substance.

This is tedious stuff. Not one hint of humor, no detectable pulse. Pedestrian truths expressed in the dullest possible language. Lifeless.

For an essay that starts with the question “What should an essay be?”, I hope not to read many more essays like this.

The fact that this boring essay is so popular here lowers my opinion of HN.

That sounds awesome! I'm working on glideapps.com

We don't have barcode scanning yet — it's a bit tricky to pull off as an iOS PWA.

Thank you for the notes — I will update!

Thanks!

Me too! What are you working on?

(OP concludes ‘programming should be more like Excel’. Glide’s mission is to apply spreadsheet programming to software in general. This is the most relevant comment, downvoters be darned!)

This is exactly why we're building https://glideapps.com!

Thank you for trying it! We hope you build something amazing and share it.

Thanks a lot!

Thank you! We actually started with JSON! It is trivial for us to support CSV and we are not tied to Google Sheets—we plan to add more data sources.

We are intrigued by the spreadsheet model of 'programming' and wanted to build upon it. Google Sheets is just one of many such implementations and we plan to have our own for real-time performance and other properties that Sheets doesn't have.

From a practical standpoint, it's a data source where people already have their data. People sign up for Glide and literally create their first app in minutes and it's ready to share. Much of this speed is due to the fact that their data is ready to go.

Here's a sample app in case you're browsing on mobile: https://go.glideapps.com/play/OAm2s2UzjLlDcTlx0JW6

(The Glide app builder cannot be opened on mobile yet)

Thank you for the report. We have work to do to enable private modes and other environments where cookies/local storage are restricted.

Thanks! Custom colors are coming!

Ok perhaps we are being inundated with signups right now, looking into our Firebase auth backend...

Hi! Docs are growing at the moment: http://help.glideapps.com

Our YouTube channel is probably the best source of info for now.

Comments are stored adjacent to the sheet in our real-time backend, and are associated with the sheet row via the Topic that you pick. Notes are stored in the sheet, so are not real-time.

Thank you! We're building on React and TypeScript. All of the design and components are custom, we're glad you like it :D

Right now images are just raw URLs. We need to do some work to make this simpler!

I'm sorry, but there are two seemingly redundant popups in our sign-up process right now. You have to auth via Google twice–once to sign up, and once to authorize Google Drive. This should be fixed this week.

Thanks!

Glide apps are first and foremost PWAs. We're rolling out shortlink support soon, so your app would be something like mycoolapp.glideapp.io. Android will prompt you to add the app to your homescreen, and on iOS we show a similar prompt. You can pay for a custom domain.

On our paid plan, we can export native builds for you to publish to app stores. Currently we have a React Native implementation of Glide that runs the app natively, rather than wrapped.

Yes, we are looking into streamlining the store publishing process in any way we can, and fastlane will come in handy. We've been surprised by how many users have been satisfied with PWAs so far, though.

Thank you! Yes we are looking forward to that integration too!

Thank you so much! It's currently simplistic but we hope to add more power but keep it approachable for your friends.

I see what you mean. Yes perhaps we should say "Export to App Store & Google Play"? Although 'export' is also a technical concept. What we really offer is native builds, and eventually we will help you publish them.

We use Linux! Submit a PR.

In the first 24 hours? Yes!

quicktype infers types from JSON, then outputs models in Swift, Java, Objective-C, and many other languages for reading that data. We just released Kotlin support today, and we're looking for feedback on the generated code, or what we could improve.

As usual, quicktype will:

  * Infer nice class and property names
  * Generate convenient `fromJson` and `toJson` methods for top-level types, including top-level arrays and maps
  * Deduplicate types inferred to be the same
  * Detect enums and emit custom marshaling code for them
  * Detect heterogeneous JSON data and emit sealed classes with custom marshaling code to keep your Kotlin typesafe
  * Distinguish Map<String, *> from custom object types automatically using Markov chains

Thank you for taking a look!

Thanks! Will correct it.

In this blog post, we explain how we used a Markov chain to detect whether a JSON object represents a class (fixed properties) or a map (dynamic keys) to infer its type and generate the same code a human programmer would for representing that data.

For example, given this Bitcoin API data:

    {

        "0000000000000000000e222e4e7afc29c49f6398783a94c846dee2e13c6408f5": {
            "size": 969709,
            "height": 510599,
            "difficulty": 3007383866429.732,
            "previous": "000000000000000000552a7783efd39eaa1c5ff6789e21a0bbe7547bc454fced"
        },
        "000000000000000000552a7783efd39eaa1c5ff6789e21a0bbe7547bc454fced": {
            "size": 991394,
            "height": 510598,
            "difficulty": 3007383866429.732,
            "previous": "00000000000000000043aba4c065d4d92aec529566287ebec5fe9010246c9589"
        },
        "00000000000000000043aba4c065d4d92aec529566287ebec5fe9010246c9589": {
            "size": 990527,
            "height": 510597,
            "difficulty": 3007383866429.732,
            "previous": "00000000000000000009025b9e95911a4dc050de129ea4eb5e40ef280751a0cb"
        }
    }

You'd expect the corresponding Swift code:

    typealias Blocks = [String: Block] // a.k.a. Dictionary<String, Block>

    struct Block {
        let size, height: Int
        let difficulty: Double
        let previous: String
    }

Rather than:

    struct Blocks {
        let _0000000000000000000e222e4e7afc29c49f6398783a94c846dee2e13c6408f5: Block
        let _00000000000000000043aba4c065d4d92aec529566287ebec5fe9010246c9589: Block
        let _00000000000000000009025b9e95911a4dc050de129ea4eb5e40ef280751a0cb: Block
    }

    struct Block {
        let size, height: Int
        let difficulty: Double
        let previous: String
    }

We taught quicktype to make the same decision by evaluating the JSON property names with a Markov chain trained on simulated class property names. Our blog article goes into detail and lets you play with our Markov chain!