Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomp | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how many of these features could be implemented (far sooner) if a universal UI scripting language was available for users...

View on HN

You know, I'm pretty sure anyone could have built these apps on Android

You can overwrite the screen in Android. You can replace the home screen in Android. You can scrape running apps in Android. There's a high degree of flexibility

Unfortunately this is probably one of those problems where the cost of building the app is relatively high (because the domain is complicated to get right!) and it would be hard to make too much money on this

CF.lumen can do this on rooted devices. I have it set up to apply a gradually-increasing f.lux-like effect as the day turns to night, and then switch to a red-channel-only color mode past midnight.

Twilight app can do the color shift without root.

It's not a proper color shift. It can, say, overlay the screen with orange, but can't reduce blue.

Hmm I think I get the difference, but can you accomplish the same thing overlaying with orange + lowering brightness?

Building an app is way too much barrier to entry... What I wish is something like, right-click or swipe down to open console, enter some script (or copy-paste/import a highly starred from a public repository), close console, ta-da. If the API was flexible enough, the scripts would mostly be short and obviously non-exploiting (i.e. a script for graying-out the screen shouldn't use the internet API) so they would be very easy to review, modify, and manage otherwise.

A few steps further you will invent something like Emacs. Or maybe Atom. Or browser extensions.

BTW do you remember why making a browser extension is a bit involved, and publishing, even more so? Trusting someone else's code. Copy -pasting it from a message board may end up in a problem.

That sounds more like a sandboxing/permissions problem... Also, it doesn't help that JavaScript is a terrible language.

https://github.com/damonkohler/sl4a has been around in one form or another for a decade or so.

It looks dead in that repository though.

http://www.qpython.org/ seems pretty well.

Hmm for this specific case I think that there might be a lot of of edge cases, just a gut feeling

But I would totally be for some much simpler packaging scheme for native apps/"scripts". It's kinda insane how much money is going into Android from Google but all the dev tools are basically just Java stuff. I really wonder what Android could be if a more lisp-y approach existed as well

it's hard less because of Android and more because you have to support hacked up vendor distros of Android if you want to see any adoption, looking at you Samshit Touchwang

There's Twilight but it's not exactly the same.

Not sure about the first example, but the second one can be done through automation apps like tasker: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.dinglisch....

How would such a language define which UI elements to operate on?

Some sort of sensible API I guess... Or something automatically generated, like Excel macros, that you can then inspect, understand and modify... If it came with "infinite" undo and some sort of playground/sandbox, people could literally experiment with very low cost.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com