Do you not use Tailwind? What is being wrapped? Designed and built this all as a Ruby gem, you can one-click install if you want to build prototypes with Rails even faster. I suppose you're not the target customer, but thanks for chiming in.
My apologies if this came off as too condescending and harsh. I’m coming from the receiving end of an app which uses Tailwind and many developers run wild with class-soup in their changes, causing all sorts of inconsistency.
Still, does not justify the caustic comment. And I’ll be spending this entire weekend obsessing on how to do better.
I'm not saying this product is good or bad, because I have no idea, but this is priced too low for it's claimed value prop, not too high. 25% of a decked out developer Macbook for something that sets the look and feel of an app and forestalls an entire designer hire is an unseriously low price.
I'm not saying the product is unserious; just that developers are generally unserious about pricing.
> 25% of a decked out developer Macbook for something that sets the look and feel of an app and forestalls an entire designer hire is an unseriously low price.
Potential value bounds the price upper end, but alternatives set what the customer will actually pay. There are much more comprehensive tools of similar nature that are offered for free.
The (somewhat) unique value proposition it offers is in how it integrates into Rails, saving an hour of a developer's time — or a couple of minutes of an LLM's time, if the slot machine happens to work in your favour on that particular spin — required to manually do it themselves. That's worth something, but if you go too high it soon becomes more cost effective to just pay someone to put in that hour.
Pricing per seat makes little sense for a component library. It forces every party involved in building an application to acquire a license, not just a designer who might otherwise have been hired once to provide the assets. Seat-based pricing suits tools people daily drive (Figma, Slack), whereas asset libraries are better priced by what you ship with them.
A more natural unit for pricing would be per domain, application, environment, or similar.
That said, I'm aware several UI frameworks have moved toward seat-based licensing recently, so it must be working for them in some sense.
There are a bunch of those for free no ? Rails blocks (paid, about the same price as this Rails UI), Ruby UI (MIT licensed), I think I saw a couple more here.
The repo was created in May 2023, and it seems like the bulk of commits were made in 2024, before vibe coding was really a thing. I think it's pretty harsh to dismiss projects in this manner.
You should use whatever framework you feel like has the best DX / fits your stack best!
We're TypeScript-first, TypeScript-only so a lot of the teams who use us are full-stack TypeScript devs and want an agent framework that feels TS-native, easy to use, and feature-complete.
Language, although an important factor, should not be the only factor to decide using a tool. I'm curious is there something unique Mastra is bringing to the table, compared to other alternatives.
What an undeserving fate. A beloved app now being passed from vulture to vulture who rip off every possible morsel they can.
When Branch bought Nova, I moved on to use Lawnchair [1], which is open source. Although it has been in beta like forever, with occasional glitches, it works well enough and has enough features to satisfy my customization cravings.
My biggest issue with lawnchair (and most launchers really) is that they all are horribly glitchy on my Pixel 6, and also break the app drawer / switching feature.
I literally just want a vanilla pixel experience, but be allowed to change the search engine on the home screen searchbar... This got me into the weeds on the widget and launcher ecosystem and they're all very bad.
I highly recommend Octopi Launcher. It's simple, has customization you might want without requiring it in order to be useful, and works great on various phones.
Also great on foldables, since it lets you have a different home screen for different display sizes.
This is very good to know! I am currently setting up my old pixel 6 to be a permanent Google home terminal. I was thinking about trying Lawnchair, now I'm not so sure.
To be fair, this was probably six or so months ago when I last went through this. Niagra had the launcher / app switching issue, so did Lawnchair, even Nova Launcher (before I knew of what had happened to them). It could have been a general bug for all launchers except the OEM.
The write-up on the link seems promising, at least. I'm sure ads will come to the free version, but they appear to be respecting Nova's legacy and longtime Prime purchasers. Anything is better than the slow decay it has been enduring the last year or two. Can't do much but be cautiously optimistic.
It’s becoming evident that open-source is the only thing that can cure Enshittification. Every proprietary application will become enshittified, it’s just a matter of when.
People that work for money will want money, and ultimately can be bought.
People that work for love produce the best they can with limited resources, and are often broke.
I don't think we've found a way to bridge the gap. I've come to generally rely on work people do for love, and I contribute to them, but it's clearly not sustainable unless they have another source of income.
Anyone who solves this will produce immense value.
What's to solve? Here's the way the gap is supposed to work and often does: People work for love or money on a product. Other people love the product and are happy to purchase it. This creates income for the original producer and a beneficial product for the consumer. If a product is successful and popular enough, the capitalist cycle gains momentum for both parties to continue the relationship.
Yet we have seen, time and time again, that those who do things for the love of money will cash out. Heck, even those who do so for the love of creating will cash out when they want to move on. While open source doesn't eliminate this possibility, at least it disincentivises it.
While I'm sure there are plenty of exceptions, exceptions that we rarely hear about because they are smaller companies that don't monopolise our attention, it is important to realize that capitalism is just a high level theory. It says things that sound good. over a long enough time period and a large enough samples it may be roughly correct. Yet it has no value over short time periods, small samples, or when it's underlying assumptions are violated.
That last bit is particularly important, even though it probably isn't applicable to Nova Launcher. Everything from the asymmetry of information, to anti-competitive actions of the business itself, to regulation will disrupt those assumptions.
Was a Nova user, moved to Lawnchair yesterday. It's not the same experience I got from Nova (for example, the Clock widget don't work), but the adaptation is not unbearable.
I purchased Nova Launcher Prime years ago thinking it was the best investment I put on Google Play, well, maybe I should've spent the money on something else.
I've been using DuckDB to process massive Excel files. Despite weird quirks [1], it has been great experience so far. I now use it to process CSV, JSON, Parquet files. It is very fast, and extremely approachable, thanks to SQL being the language for interaction.
I wasn't all that excited about SQL at first, but I've come around to it. Initially I really wanted to keep all of my data and operations in the application layer, and I'd gone to great lengths to model that to make it possible. I had this vision of all types of operations, queries, and so on being totally type safe and kept in a code-based registry such that I could do things like provide a GUI on top of data and functions I knew were 100% valid an compile-time. The only major drawback was that some kinds of changes to the application would require updating the repository.
I still love that idea but SQL turns out to be so battle-proven, reliable, flexible, capable, and well-documented that it's really hard to beat. After giving it a shot for a couple of weeks it became clear that it would yield a way more flexible and capable application. I'm confident enough that I can overcome the rough edges with the right abstractions and some polish over time.
After using several Precisions at work, I now firmly believe that Dell does not know how to cool their workstations properly. They are all heavy, pretty bad at energy efficiency and run extremely hot (I use my work machine laid belly up in summer since fans are always on). I’d take a ThinkPad or Mac any day over any Dell.
Power hungry intel chips and graphics cards are inconvenient in laptops when it comes to battery life and cooling. It is especially noticeable if you spend any time using an M-series macbook pro, where performance is the same or better, but you get 16 hours of battery life. I prefer to use thinkpads, but apple just has a big technological advantage here that stands out in the UX department. I really hope advances are made quickly by competitors to get similar UX in a more affordable package.
While I appreciate the build quality and ruggedness of the thinkpads, I’d take the bigger trackpad and better screen of the XPS/precision any day. Or, maybe my employer screwed me by giving a shitty thinkpad SKU (it has a 1080p TN panel ffs)..
I used to do this so often during my university days. In today's attention-starved ecosystem, drift is such a luxury. There's this urge to fill the gap, with scrolling on our phones, impulse shopping online, or just opening and closing the apps. We've subscribed to the fear of missing out, of being out of touch, of being left behind.
Drifting is a way to push all that feedback in the background. It does not necessarily have to be a staycation at a cafe. It can be a walk in a park, a morning jog with a friend who's comfortable with your silence, a book reading session in the twilight. We need to slow down and relax to truly appreciate the pace of life, and drifting is such an awesome way to do it. Lovely post. It reminded me of good times in the past, and that I need to make time for them in future.
SQL is such a joy to work with compared to all the baggage ORMs bring. I’m not against ORMs but I like to keep them as thin as possible (mostly to map columns to data objects). I’ve been happily using JDBC and Spring Data JDBC (when I needed to use Repository pattern) for a long time in Java.
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