(2020-02-28) Sloan An App Can Be A Homecooked Meal

Robin Sloan: An app can be a home-cooked meal. I made a messaging app for, and with, my family. It is ruth­lessly simple; we love it; no one else will ever use it. 2019-11-17-SloanWeek47TheJawsOfTheCommons

My story begins with another app, now defunct, called Tapstack.

Opening the app, you saw a live feed from your phone’s camera.

Just like Snapchat or Instagram, you tapped to capture a photo, pressed to record a video. As soon as you lifted your finger, your message zipped away, with no editing, no reviewing. A “stack” of messages awaited you in the corner, and, after you tapped through them, they were discarded.

For several years, Tapstack was the main channel for my family’s communication.

The app didn’t lend itself to practical corre­spon­dence or logis­tical coordination; its strength was ambient presence

In 2019, I felt a rising dread as the months ticked by and the app didn’t receive a single update. Sure enough, in the fall, Tapstack announced that it was shutting down

My family all agreed we were going to need a replacement, and while my first instinct was to set up a group on Instagram or WhatsApp, the prospect of having our warm channel surrounded — encroached upon — by all that other garbage made me feel even sadder than the prospect of losing Tapstack.

Tapstack was simple to start with, and I made it even simpler

The core of the app is a camera view with the now-familiar tap/press for photo/video affordance. This is an off-the-rack open source component; what a gift.

Besides the app itself, not much is required: an AWS S3 bucket to hold the photos and videos, a couple of AWS Lambda functions to shuffle things around when new messages are uploaded.

I distributed the app to my family using TestFlight, and in Test­Flight it shall remain forever

In a better world, I would have built this in a day, using some kind of modern, flexible HyperCard for iOS.

This app is Entirely Itself — not a framework, not a template — and that’s insep­a­rable from the spirit in which it was made. Which brings me to:

Cooking at home

For a long time, I have struggled to artic­u­late what kind of programmer I am.

I am the program­ming equiv­a­lent of a home cook. (indie)

The exhor­ta­tion “learn to code” has its foun­da­tions in market value.

But let’s substi­tute a different phrase: “learn to cook”. (cooking)

People don’t only learn to cook so they can become chefs.

Cooking reaches beyond buying and selling to touch nearly all of human experience. It connects to domes­ticity and curiosity; to history and culture; to care and love.

Well, it’s the 21st century now, and I suspect that many of the people you love are waiting inside the pocket computer you are never long without, so I will gently suggest that perhaps coding might connect the same way.

This messaging app I built for, and with, my family, it won’t change unless we want it to change

What is this feeling? Independence? Security? Sovereignty? Is it simply … the feeling of being home?

Update, February 2022: Two years later, my family still uses BoopSnoop every day. I have added one (1) feature, at my mother’s request.

Update, February 2023: Yep, still using it every day!