As someone that's never fly fished before, I found it to be a nice shallow wade into something I knew nothing about and came away slightly richer knowledge-wise for it.
But I do agree, it could probably use some more of the creator’s own personality and some restraint design wise if it were to go beyond scratching an itch.
I’ve found it very useful to leverage the “speed” of AI to iron out all of the UX-questions of a greenfield side project (an organiser for a/my family).
My first aim is to get to what feels like v1 feature-completeness. My approach is building out the feature, dogfooding it for a few days, work out the bits I don’t like, adjusting, and then rinse and repeating.
I don’t like the finer UI details (the colours it’s chosen for instance), nor do I fully jive with how it’s implemented the business logic (it’s verbose and needlessly fancy in some places) but - that’s not what I’m concerned about now. I’m concerned about whether my wife and I find the tool useful. (We do, huzzah).
I’m now looking forward to sitting down and redesigning the finer details of the UI to my taste, and then, having established pretty solidly how the backend is going to need to work, how I would do it, and then crack on and do a rewrite from the ground up so that I can maintain/extend it more effectively going forward.
Which is all to say, I find Claude and it’s kin are excellent for prototyping (answering questions, giving someone something to play with), and for uncovering/discovering the requirements of a project which make it then easier to do “properly” if you feel it hasn’t done a good job already.
Everyone will have their own approach of course, but I’ve found it helpful to take this one in this case.
Rich widgets on the Home Screen are valuable too. As a web developer, I wish I were able to make widgets for people to put on their Home Screen to perform certain actions in less clicks, or have information from my (web) apps easily viewable at a glance. Which I know they would want. Right now, as far as I’m aware, for me to do that in iOS (and possibly Android) is to build those in native land.
Photography was considered pretty uncool; it removed what at the time was perceived as all of the skill. We now can appreciate deeper aspects of captured images such as composition, and we now see painted portraits replaced by more abstract, surreal, or imagined imagery. Generative AI is similarly revolutionary in that it moves away from realism back into the realm of the imaginary; whether or not a user's prompts can be appreciated remains to be seen.
Fun fact: copyright law was invented in the UK basically because painters and sculptors (!) considered photography theft. That came to a large degree before "real" text copyright as we know it today.
> Fun fact: copyright law was invented in the UK basically because painters and sculptors (!) considered photography theft. That came to a large degree before "real" text copyright as we know it today.
This is...not true? Or at least I can find no basis for your claims.
UK Copyright for books and sculpture predated the invention of photography and existed in a completely recognizable form ("a copyright term of 14 years, with a provision for renewal for a similar term, during which only the author and the printers to whom they chose to license their works could publish the author's creations.[4] Following this, the work's copyright would expire, with the material falling into the public domain"[1]).
Paintings and photographs gained copyright protection at the same time, in the 1862 Fine Arts Copyright Act, seemingly because it seemed natural to extend the haphazardly covered fine arts more completely.
Digital Photography and digital painting. Both were considered deeply offensive to a lot of artists. I have witnessed both first hand and the criticisms were verbatim the same as AI.
They said you couldn't become a good photographer if you didn't learn it with the limitation of film that forced you to make each shot count. Photoshopping a picture made it "not a real photo" and was banned from online communities and irl events, drawing in photoshop was not considered art. I find it very ironic that digital artists are repeating the exact same argument as the one used against their art
Switching to digital didn't change their fundamental mechanics, that's why they're still called photography and painting.
But there's no such thing as AI photography, and it's debatable how much mixed AI tools like inpainting are actually like painting and not just like issuing corrections to a commissioned painter. Just generating images from prompts definitely isn't AI painting.
Limiting the number of shots and putting thought into each one, composition, focus in detail, exposure and other technicalities is important for great photos. Similar to AI if the person using the tool is mindless about it the resukts will just be mid as well as little to no growth and learning will be achieved.
I enjoy the concept, and think you could be onto something - but it seemed a bit too easy to be satisfying. I think the path to solving the puzzle is a bit too straightforward. That is, removing a letter one by one WILL get you to the solution, and there’s not enough of a cognitive work-out to figure out the next one to remove.
I don’t have a solution mind you, but having made Stackdown and been on a similar journey, I needed the feedback to get it where it is now.
It can be a slog to build and release a game like this, so well done on getting it out! Personally, I think it’s quite well polished UI wise. UX wise I guess keyboard input as others have said would be nice. On mobile I really want to drag the letters to re-order them, - but - at the same time it works just fine. We’ve had loads of feedback for https://puzzlist.com/stackdown and I felt pretty overwhelmed so if you feel like that, be encouraged, squint your eyes and see all the positivity from what you’ve made!
Was tickled when I saw the fork feature. I’ve often thought recipe sites missed that and coming from a software dev background I guess it seems obvious where we’ve got used to forking in git. It was on the roadmap for my stab at a recipe site: https://osomatsu.net
It seems such a shame to forego a literal dinner-fork as an icon for the feature though? :)
Really love this, kudos for making it! Can listen to the Sonic 2 soundtrack on loop for hours.
Just a note to say that on MacOS Safari none of the icons or fonts seem to want to load. Looking at the console it appears to be lots of CORS-related issues. I.e, "Cancelled load to <a package url> because it violates the resource's Cross-Origin-Resource-Policy response header."
Just tried it and, apart from the UI being highly confusing (you just get a blank workspace basically, and it's unclear how to see other DBs and objects in them) it seems to have no support for PG schemas. When I did manage to connect to my DB it showed me the tables in the "public" schema only.
But I do agree, it could probably use some more of the creator’s own personality and some restraint design wise if it were to go beyond scratching an itch.