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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   2432 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 31, 2024

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Android app? Almost certainly a bad idea, unless you already have experience in building android apps and getting them onto your phone. Just figuring out how to build a "hello world" level app and get it onto your phone could easily take 8 hours by itself, much less setting up even a fairly basic UI that's functional. Using GSheets as a data store sounds like a bad idea too, way too much work to interface with. What I'd do is, in this order, following the steps until you think it's good enough or get tired of it or whatever:

  1. Open up dev tools network tab the next time you use the form. Note down everything about the request to actually reserve a spot and what it returns on success and failure.
  2. Put together a CLI script on your developer machine to make those requests. Iterate on that until you are able to successfully reserve a spot without using the website directly. Doesn't matter what language, Python is fine, just make direct HTTP requests, you almost certainly don't need full browser emulation.
  3. Hard-code in the info for your regular visitors, implement a decent CLI interface to make reservations for any of them. This is probably good enough for most people.
  4. Turn that script into a basic web server, running locally on the developer machine. A few simple HTML pages to interface with it you can use on the browser on your developer machine.
  5. If you still really want to use it on mobile, rework the CSS etc until those pages look good on a mobile browser
  6. You could leave it running on your developer machine or some other machine in your local network and access it from your mobile any time you're on your home WiFi. Or you could deploy it to a proper web server somewhere, probably for free, maybe using Google Cloud Run or something like that, to be able to use it on your mobile from anywhere. It'll be on a weirdo URL nobody can guess, so you can probably get away with no authorization. And the visitors are still hard-coded, so you'd need a redeploy to add or remove anyone, but that shouldn't be hard enough to be annoying.
  7. If you're still feeling ambitious, add a proper DB on the server to store visitor info, and web interfaces for managing them. Probably ought to do authorization too at this stage.
  8. For even more ambition, set it up so other residents can register themselves on your system, enter their own visitor lists, and reserve spots too. Then advertise it to other people in your building, or even people in other buildings that use the same system.

Thanks for the walkthrough! Think you're absolutely right in avoiding an entirely new platform (i.e. phone). Think I'll aim for step 3 on your list. Then maybe before the EOY GPT 4.5's user agent will be able to assist with the rest (like on mobile).

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