software

software

Webapp Composer

By on Monday, June 11, 2018

Webapp Composer aims to give you another tool in your arsenal to increase your productivity and manage your screen real-estate effectively! Any “webapp”, or web application, can be composed into a layout with other webapps.

At the moment, the implementation is very simple, it’s really just a pair of iframes that you stick whatever URLs (to whatever webapps) you want into them. The screenshot to the right shows two pretty useful webapps sharing a single two-column layout: TickTick and TimeCamp.

If I manage to keep working on it, I intend on putting in a ton more features, with the ultimate aim of not requiring the user to drop into the source code in order to edit things!

Webapp Composer will be released under the MIT License, making it free to use. Head on over to the project’s source code hosted on Gitlab.com: https://gitlab.com/alex_ford/webapp-composer

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Initial push of Beancount mini-projects to Gitlab

By on Saturday, April 28, 2018

I’ve switched over my personal finance accounting to a pretty neat open source software application called Beancount. Now, it’s not for the faint of heart. It’s best suited for coders/developers and similar types of people who don’t mind getting a little dirty with scripts and learning how to work with a tool on the command line.

With that said, I’ve been especially attracted to it’s simple and elegant data representation, which is all done in plain text! No wacky or proprietary data formats to worry about. Beancount, and it’s associated web front end Fava, do a lot of great stuff right out of the box. But my financial needs are a bit more complex, and so, for the past few months, I’ve been working on an assortment of Python, Bash, and PowerShell scripts to help do what I want with Beancount. I have a TON of ideas for improvements to the app!

To get things started, I’ve reorganized my singular repository into about 15 or so smaller ones. This is somewhat of an experiment, as I’ve never tried to maintain this many “small” repos before. We’ll see if the overhead drives me up the wall, or if it turns out to be coding bliss. Enough of me rambling, if you’re interested in seeing what I’ve currently made public, head on over to my Gitlab Profile page:

Beancount Mini-projects on Gitlab

Full disclosure: some stuff might be broken until I go back through everything and vet it after the reorg. I’m advertising the public repos as available now because there is still some good stuff in there, and I want to start the process of networking with people and potentially collaborating on some of these mini-projects!

   Project NameDescriptionUsable as of
2018-04-28?
Beancount SecureSome ideas which increase the security capabilities of Beancount (which are basically non-existent).

No – ideation.

Beancount INSImport and Sync capabilities that I’ve attempted to add to Beancount.

Yes – prototype.

Beancount TemplatesTemplates of transactions and entry helpers to make entering these templates easier.Yes – prototype.
Beancount VagrantCreates a full Ubuntu based VM with all the necessary software to run Beancount (and Fava) using Vagrant and VirtualBox. (Recommend Beancount Fava Docker instead – see below!)Yes.
Beancount SchedulerAdds scheduled transactions and related capabilities to Beancount.Yes – prototype.
Beancount Fava DockerContainerizes Beancount and Fava using Docker technology (thanks to ‘yegle/fava’) and provides useful scripts to interface with Beancount when it is running in a Docker container.Yes.
Beancount IonicA mobile/progressive app for Beancount which uses the Ionic Framework. Can run on basically all devices ranging from desktops, to phones!No – prototype.
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