Show HN: Red Goose – Convert your website to mobile app https://bit.ly/3Co5Ogm

Show HN: Red Goose – Convert your website to mobile app Hi HN! We're Sonica, Marvin, and Satie, and we are building Red Goose (https://bit.ly/3CvR92N). Red Goose is a web app to mobile app conversion engine that produces ready-to-publish apps for the app stores using GitHub repos. There was a discussion on HN a few weeks ago about how a developer shaved off almost half of their native app's code without losing functionality [1]. Our launch today is a direct outcome of that thread and, moreso, in the context of this comment [2] and this one [3]. Paraphrasing the context below: > "Fastmail is the only email/calendar app with a reasonable size (just 20MB)." Followed by: > "… EDIT: just realized the app is a web view. Sigh." As someone who has been into mobile app development since 2010, the comments above read like a punch to the gut. We grew up believing that the native experience was better than the web! It took a while to admit, but the web, it appears, has genuinely caught on. It has matured to a point where the four pillars of web development—HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and WebAssembly—are likely enough for universal distribution. We already host compute-heavy environments for graphic designers [4], video editors [5], and rich document editing [6] on the web. And there is still more capability [7] in the works, if you will. So the question we asked ourselves was: Could the modern web become the "native stack" of mobile app development? With Red Goose, we want developers to be able to do just that. Create web applications that double up as mobile apps for the app stores. But this isn't always easy. Historically, native mobile apps have differed from (outdone?) the mobile web in three broad ways: An app-specific design language, Smooth and fancy screen transitions and, Solving compute-heavy processes that scaled to millions of users. However, at the same time, building and maintaining native mobile apps is super expensive, and it requires hiring separate teams of experienced developers whose sole job is to focus on mobile APIs. Even with the newest alternatives like React Native, Flutter, Cordova, Xamarin, Ionic, or any other similar framework, there is a quantum increase in the amount of boilerplate code. Over time, as many of us have experienced in the industry, the web and native teams grow distant, leading to a less than optimum situation and bloat. Red Goose puts the webview back in the ring. This step alone removes all the duplicated code from the equation. Red Goose then offers an alternate strategy [8], using the webview as the main leverage over your web app. And solve for native experience in the following three ways: First—Intrinsic Design: we have built a new css framework called Toucaan [9] to tackle the gaps between mobile app design and mobile web. It allows the development of "app-like" interfaces using new css standards and the intrinsic qualities of the medium. Second—Screen Transitions and Animations: Not all apps need this, but smooth transitions and performant animations are already possible with the new web APIs. With a strongly cached webpage using a service worker (PWA) and a better understanding of initial containing blocks (ICBs) pertaining to your front end, one can easily take steps to take the experience to the next level. Third—Webassembly: The best thing about webassembly is that the wasm functions return immediately and synchronously. So one can easily offload compute-heavy transactions to a locally installed wasm utility and benefit from performance gains instantly on both web and mobile apps. It appears that many apps wouldn't need to sprinkle webassembly into the mix to reach the level of performance expected of mobile apps, and just caching with a service worker and an app-like layout would do the trick. Red Goose itself uses vanilla javascript and an experimental version of Toucaan for its frontend. Its backend is made with Node.js, Express, and MongoDB and is hosted on AWS within Docker. Our web-to-mobile app conversion pipeline uses NodeGit for app delivery, and the freshly minted mobile apps are written in Swift or Kotlin and shared directly over GitHub. We believe that the opportunity to reduce app development and distribution cost using the newfangled powers of the web is massive—we've already helped a few teams to cut back on their expenses by as much as 80%. At the same time, we're still early and would love to hear what you think about what we're building with Red Goose. We look forward to your comments and experiences, especially if you have been on this path before on your own. Thanks! Relevant links: HN Discussion: [1] https://bit.ly/3CmjDvD [2] https://bit.ly/3CjMOQ2 [3] https://bit.ly/3RpRYy0 Leading web examples: [4] https://bit.ly/3ClgmfT [5] https://bit.ly/3E83oUo [6] https://bit.ly/3dQ02KZ [7] https://bit.ly/3CjF5kY Tooling: [8] https://bit.ly/3RrndsL [9] https://bit.ly/3E4dtkW The end. September 30, 2022 at 11:28AM

Show HN: Alinea – open-source headless CMS https://bit.ly/3ftORrQ

Show HN: Alinea – open-source headless CMS https://bit.ly/3dQwTz8 September 29, 2022 at 04:01PM

Show HN: Coupon – self-hostable store for coupons/discounts and loyalty cards https://bit.ly/3E7BNm3

Show HN: Coupon – self-hostable store for coupons/discounts and loyalty cards https://bit.ly/3EbJOX0 September 29, 2022 at 03:07PM

Show HN: Liqe – lightweight Lucene-like parser and serializer for JavaScript https://bit.ly/3SgF6vv

Show HN: Liqe – lightweight Lucene-like parser and serializer for JavaScript https://bit.ly/3BTfFXU September 29, 2022 at 03:07PM

Show HN: Jiter – Just in Time Webhooks https://bit.ly/3y1QCmm

Show HN: Jiter – Just in Time Webhooks https://bit.ly/3Sqx9DW September 29, 2022 at 02:58PM

Show HN: A Node.js SDK to embed zero trust principles in your app https://bit.ly/3SpVz0n

Show HN: A Node.js SDK to embed zero trust principles in your app https://bit.ly/3SE2B1X September 29, 2022 at 12:45PM

Show HN: Restapp.io – SQL Data Modeling Tool in No/Low Code https://bit.ly/3RgKGwE

Show HN: Restapp.io – SQL Data Modeling Tool in No/Low Code Hey all! We've been working on RestApp V1 and this is our first time posting it on HN. It's an No/Low Code data modeling tool that enables you to build & maintain data pipelines with a visual programming interface. We don't store your data but we compute them through Apache Spark for query speed & efficiency. Here's some features: `Connectors: Connect to any source and destinations (DB, DWH and SaaS Applications). We currently support MongoDB, Snowflake, BigQuery, MySQL, MSSQL, SFTP (JSON, txt, csv, excel files supported), Hubspot, Stripe, GDrive (JSON, txt, csv, excel files supported). `Pipeline: Visual Programming Interface where you drag-and-drop SQL, NoSQL & Python functions instead of writing them to create a query and debug it easily. `Automation: You can automate your data pipeline (Job) through a scheduler. `Domain: Think of it like a workspace in which you can share securely your connectors and pipelines to specific users (colleagues, partners, clients...) We've designed this because as a data team member, we were writing a lot of long SQL queries with bad performances and we were getting headaches by debugging them. Now you can build, monitor and debug any kind of data pipelines with just Drag-and-drop built-in SQL functions to save you tremendous amount of time & effort. We're working on this continuously so we're keen to hear any feedback. Feature requests and critique are more than welcome. Try it out for free (30min of computing time offered each month): https://bit.ly/3E3glhW The Getting Started docs are here for anyone who wants to check this out: https://bit.ly/3LRbxOC and https://bit.ly/3fsiQ3c... https://bit.ly/3E3glhW September 28, 2022 at 11:14AM

Show HN: ButtFish – Transmit Morse Code of chess moves to your butt https://bit.ly/3StPQa8

Show HN: ButtFish – Transmit Morse Code of chess moves to your butt https://bit.ly/3ULhaC1 September 28, 2022 at 11:55PM

Show HN: My PowerShell pixel art editor https://bit.ly/3ryQIOV

Show HN: My PowerShell pixel art editor I got a bit carried away writing an editor so I could draw some pixel art for starting my blog and ended up with some pwsh spaghetti that's quite fun to use. https://bit.ly/3dOhH5y September 28, 2022 at 04:04PM

Show HN: My Q&A with Neal Stephenson on making the Metaverse himself https://bit.ly/3SpX7aM

Show HN: My Q&A with Neal Stephenson on making the Metaverse himself https://bit.ly/3fooeV4 September 28, 2022 at 10:17PM

Show HN: Devlog on my Python graphics engine – node editor optimization https://bit.ly/3y1mveG

Show HN: Devlog on my Python graphics engine – node editor optimization I've started making devlogs for my python graphics engine. In this episode I'm discussing node editor optimizations I've implemented, like node collision detection and culling. Hope You find it interesting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwDbfk7M1TE September 28, 2022 at 03:18PM

Show HN: A formally verified native Delta Lake implementation in Rust https://bit.ly/3dR6mBQ

Show HN: A formally verified native Delta Lake implementation in Rust https://bit.ly/3Rizhwq September 28, 2022 at 07:03AM

Show HN: KaithemAutomation, the home automation system for coders and artists https://bit.ly/3RkruxO

Show HN: KaithemAutomation, the home automation system for coders and artists I've talked about this one on Reddit a bit, and I think it's finally about ready to talk about here. I started this project around 2013 for internal use, and GPL licensed it because I have no desire to own my own software business. Kaithem is, for the most part, somewhere between a SCADA and a Home Assistant clone, heavily focused on easy deployment with minimal tinkering. It allows for Python code based if-then events you edit via the web, along with web-editable HTML dashboards, but also includes loadable modules for more point-and-click style editing. One of these is Chandler, a scenes/cues manager that includes a simple visual scripting language inspired by ladder logic. It saves everything you create in Git-friendly plain text files, and is meant to integrate well with a linux system, with convenience features like using the user account username/password to log in. Device drivers created via an extension API, and can also be used in non-kaithem apps, via the iot_devices library. Drivers should be share-able and installable via pip. There's also basic builtin support for IP cameras, including sub-second latency streaming via websockets, and object detect recording. Out-of-the-box device support is pretty limited at the moment, consisting entirely of stuff I've had a use case for personally, but does include YeeLight, RTL433-supported sensors, SainSmart relay boards, and most anything ZigBee2MQTT can handle. In addition, there are tag points and alarms vaguely copied from SCADA systems, modules can make use of the tagpoint object, which is like a variable that hooks into the tag point system, every point gets a management page where you can set alarms, set up logging, which includes the ability to only log the min, max, or average over time, to save space, and override it's value. It uses only external dependencies found in the Debian repos, and does not include any crazy built in custom feature downloader thingy like some similar projects, nor anything that needs compilation. It does not use a database, separate web server, or any other thing that would require you to specifically configure the system in an unusual way, although some features can make use of MQTT, and it does depend on PipeWire being set up if you want to use the built in audio live mixer(You may also be able to use it with manually started JACK). It's 99% stable, used in real installs, and could probably be called v1.0 already, but there are unmaintained experimental features that will probably disappear(Anything that involves a custom nonstandard network protocol is on the chopping block, as per my philosophy of decustomizing technology, as is HTTPS support as that may be better done externally). https://bit.ly/3DZjwr3 September 28, 2022 at 06:11AM

Show HN: Refurb – A tool for refurbishing and modernizing Python codebases https://bit.ly/3CfBFQ1

Show HN: Refurb – A tool for refurbishing and modernizing Python codebases https://bit.ly/3LRSMec September 28, 2022 at 04:27AM

Show HN: debounce, throttle and requestAnimationFrame https://bit.ly/3fiVSeJ

Show HN: debounce, throttle and requestAnimationFrame https://bit.ly/3fiVT2h September 27, 2022 at 11:51PM

Show HN: A curation of resources telling the story of Bitcoin https://bit.ly/3Sjxbxz

Show HN: A curation of resources telling the story of Bitcoin Spend the past couple of months creating a large curation of resources from the best Bitcoin educators. The goal was to create a wholesome journey that went beyond just talking about what Bitcoin is and how it works, but also helps newcomers understand why Bitcoin exists and why it can be such an impactful technology for people all over the world. I hope it can help people get a broader understanding of Bitcoin and allow them to make an informed judgement on its value to the world. p.s. I would love to make this community-driven and the GitBook is open-source. Do contribute if you would like to! It would be much appreciated. https://bit.ly/3SjxeJL September 27, 2022 at 06:59PM

Show HN: MockMechanics is now open source https://bit.ly/3DTTMMN

Show HN: MockMechanics is now open source Hey guys, a couple of years ago I posted about MockMechanics, a visual programming language/sandbox building game that I've been working on and there was a very positive response [0]. Since then I've been implementing most of the things I promised in my first youtube video [1] and making it ready for an open source release and I'm happy to say it's ready [2]. I've also been building new things and showing them in the youtube channel. It's written in clojure and you can use it to create all sorts of machines, games, musical instruments, etc using little to no code at all. You've seen the piano, the tetris game, the clock the combination safe and so on but since then I've built a 3d printer, a robotic hand, a bubble sorting algorithm, a 7 segment display, a ball cannon, a paint program and more, you can see all these things in the youtube channel [3]. [0] https://bit.ly/2HIJWT0 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrwxbQj5mj0 [2] https://bit.ly/3SesiWq [3] https://www.youtube.com/c/MockMechanics Channel trailer with some of the new machines - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQiA42ReNYE https://bit.ly/3SesiWq September 27, 2022 at 04:33PM

Show HN: Dot Net Change Tracking Tool https://bit.ly/3DXOH5V

Show HN: Dot Net Change Tracking Tool https://bit.ly/3DTo6qR September 27, 2022 at 11:34AM

Show HN: Get conversational practice in over 20 languages by talking to an AI https://bit.ly/3rh9pGl

Show HN: Get conversational practice in over 20 languages by talking to an AI Hi everyone, Let me introduce you to Quazel, where we want to enable people to talk their way to fluency. We have all tried various language learning apps and tools, however, one aspect of language learning current services are really bad at is conversational practice. You might get a chat-like interface, but in the end, the conversation partner will only respond with a predefined "if the users say X I say Y". With Quazel that's completely different. In completely dynamic and unscripted conversation you can talk about pretty much anything you want. For example, you can try ordering food at a restaurant and even hold a philosophical discussion with Socrates. Additionally, you can analyze the grammar of your responses or use hints to help you out when you get stuck. We want to change how languages are learned from a grammar-centric approach to a more natural, conversation-focused one. https://bit.ly/3E22bxT September 27, 2022 at 10:18AM

Show HN: Daily Dalle – AI-generated art in your inbox every morning https://bit.ly/3SiVDz8

Show HN: Daily Dalle – AI-generated art in your inbox every morning https://bit.ly/3xUvXAq September 27, 2022 at 12:20AM