Tiny Apps

by lsh • 9 years ago

266 111 9 years ago

lsh6• 9 years ago

I was curious about how small (file size) and efficient (memory) I could write a program with a GUI and came across this old gem. Most of them have links to their source.

christophilus• 9 years ago

This is refreshing to see. I was just at the doctor today, and they mentioned how a recent system update (they use a system called Epic) made their receipt printing go from an abysmal 30 seconds to a full minute.

It seems that programs get bloated and slower with each passing day. I'd love to see a Renaissance of small, focused, efficient applications.

Spivak• 9 years ago

Bloat wouldn't even account for a delay this long. This seems to be the realm of bad design or overly cautious developers. My guess is that 'printing the receipt' really means process the transaction hitting a bunch of different record stores and APIs along the way and that the system waits for all of that to complete before sending the print job.

seibelj2• 9 years ago

From what I've heard, Epic is the best out of all the EMR (electronic medical record) software platforms!

torrent-of-ions• 9 years ago

The quality of programmers working for companies like this is terrible. I'm talking about programmers who claim to "know" C++ because they used it once during a computer science project and just managed to avoid getting segfaults too often after lots of trial and error. Writing a small, effective program has been a sign of competence forever because we know that you can't "fake" it. You really have to know what you're doing.

dahoramanodoceu2• 9 years ago

This is why i have the habit of never updating anything unless it's linux.

jaclaz3• 9 years ago

Have a look at this one (Winexplorer by Edgar Hansen):

https://web.archive.org/web/20160710205728/http://donkeyssta...

https://web.archive.org/web/20160619170739fw_/http://donkeys...

Via Wayback Machine,unfortunately, as often happens another dead piece of the internet.

The actual Winexplorer tool has not been cached, I just uploaded a copy here:

http://www90.zippyshare.com/v/OlyKhob6/file.html

The compiled executable is 164 kb, and the .zip includes sources.

It is a simple replacement for Explorer with a number of nice features.

lsh6• 9 years ago

Thankyou, I think I will.

brianbreslin• 9 years ago

tangentially related: wasn't there a website of single page web apps a few years ago? I'd love to see tiny SaaS or software solutions listed somewhere.

vbrendel• 9 years ago

https://www.producthunt.com/

steanne5• 9 years ago

nice! mailed them a couple more.

mmsimanga• 9 years ago

Perhaps you could add software links to your comment. I am always on the lookout for small applications that get the job done.

steanne5• 9 years ago

http://www.softwareok.com/?seite=Freeware/AlwaysMouseWheel

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/nircmd.html

jaclaz3• 9 years ago

A good ol' favourite of mine, the DSFOK toolkit:

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~nulifetv/freezip/freeware/

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~nulifetv/freezip/freeware/dsf...

Sort of dd for Windows:

dsfi.exe 5,061 bytes

dsfo.exe 6,637 bytes

fsz 6,144 bytes <- same use as /dev/zero can create files filled with 00's

And - as a side note - a related rant: http://reboot.pro/topic/15207-why-everything-is-so-dmn-diifi...

ethana• 9 years ago

I've been using a replacement of network>Proxomitron proxy filter tool called Proxydomo available on github. God bless the guy that reverse engineered the original.

[1] https://github.com/amate/Proxydomo

kdeenanauth• 9 years ago

Wow what a throwback..I've been using Fiddler for some quick proxying but it still doesn't compare to Proxomitron

iliketosleep• 9 years ago

Progress is modern computing has only been exceeded in the increased in bloatware! Using these lean and mean apps on modern hardware is heavenly - the way I imagined, 10 years ago, of how things would be today.

RachelF• 9 years ago

Yeah, heaven is old software on new hardware!

JustSomeNobody• 9 years ago

Not sure of your intent, but:

Even the latest MacOS, Windows, Linux, etc are all running decades old chunks of code. And yet, they still run well.

Old code is debugged code. It's (mostly) proven code. It's aged leather. It feels good and it just works.

Everything doesn't have to be "modern".

bananaboy• 9 years ago

Hey nice! I wrote a minimal Windows console-based hex editor [0] just recently for fun. Maybe I should submit it.

[0] https://github.com/samizzo/hexed

pingiun• 9 years ago

That's really cool! You should submit it

Lerc• 9 years ago

When I see the specs of things like the Raspberry Pi and Apps like this, it makes me wonder how great a system like that could be.

Executable size may not be the best measure of these things though. Ram usage of some things can be quite huge. tinyapps.org seems to avoid this by disallowing things needing runtimes, which while not the cause of RAM bloat, often tends to be a common factor.

I'd actually like to see an interface for micro controller style apps. Like An 8 bit AVR emulator that could do some kernel syscalls to the hosted environment. It would allow for a class of apps to be written that would have a fixed memory footprint. There's some Irony here in that this would also be a runtime.

I once had a volume knob widget on my task bar that used 4 meg of ram. Somehow I feel it could have been done better.

rebootthesystem• 9 years ago

Writing tiny apps for small constrained systems isn't difficult at all. That's what we did thirty years ago. One neat trick is to use threaded interpretive languages (FORTH).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/4_Pi

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/flyout/flyfeature...

The minute you start touching modern languages and OS's things become significantly more difficult to shrink into small platforms.

voltagex_5• 9 years ago

I've been thinking about this a lot, mainly due to being grumpy about the proliferation of Electron apps and the effect that's having on my available RAM.

When I'm not being so grumpy, I'm glad it's easier to write apps than ever before. I think someone on here posited that it's a choice between something written in Electron or not written at all. I think that's fair enough - maybe we just need to make it easier to write tiny apps. Rust and Go look great, even with a very steep learning curve coming from C# and Python.

And yes, I know as a C# developer sitting on top of hundreds of megabytes of runtime, I'm "part of the problem".

lsh6• 9 years ago

I'm a python and clojure dev, and part of the reason for going in search of tiny apps with source code was to see how they managed it. I know I'm part of the problem too, I like working at a very high level, but I, too, am getting old and grumpy and detest how 16GB ram isn't enough these days.

I was actually, partly, looking for a community who built or curated lists of apps with artificial constraints, for example: app must not use more than N MB of ram, must be open source, etc.

there is the demo scene, but I want to build practical apps, and there is suckless, but I found their community and philosophy a bit ... hardcore and unaccommodating.

microtonal2• 9 years ago

I'm glad it's easier to write apps than ever before.

But it was easy before. If you are willing to forego completely native UIs (which you are when you are using Electron), it's always been easy to make GUI apps with Qt. Drag together an UI in designer, use (py|whatever)uic to generate classes, hook up signals/slots, and you are done.

I can only pin it on intellectual laziness of front-end programmers not wanting to learn anything else than HTML/CSS/JS and companies wanting replaceable developers. There is virtually no benefit for the end user over native applications or cross-platform applications written with e.g. Qt.

roryisok3• 9 years ago

The thing about electron is, there's a time and a place for it.

VsCode is an excellent use case for electron - a complex cross platform app with a very quick release cycle, a large plugin ecosystem and a requirement for display and processing of a lot of different types of markup.

But I've also seen a tray notification app worn in electron. It didn't even have a UI. There's also an sd card formatter, and a "quick" launcher.

Devs who wasn't to release some tiny single function app like this should rightly be ridiculed for using electron, but more complex stuff (gitKraken etc) should get a pass. Building a large, complex editor is hard work

TeMPOraL• 9 years ago

And yes, I know as a C# developer sitting on top of hundreds of megabytes of runtime, I'm "part of the problem".

This should be a solvable problem, IMO.

I mean, C/C++ apps are not inherently tiny - they sit on top of a large runtime too, but one that usually comes with the OS. What makes Python or Lisp apps (in binary form) multi-megabyte by default is that they can't depend on users having the runtime installed, unlike C/C++ apps. JVM managed to cross that gap too - most users, at some point, will install a JRE, which allows .jar files to be small.

I wonder why generalized solution for managing programming language runtimes OS/user-side didn't materialize.

yoodenvranx• 9 years ago

I'm glad it's easier to write apps than ever before.

I believe that it is Delphi which sits right at the sweet spot of 'native code', 'easy gui development' and 'easy deploy' and I am sad that it is not really in use anymore.

Jaruzel2• 9 years ago

I once had a volume knob widget on my task bar that used 4 meg of ram. Somehow I feel it could have been done better.

Yesterday, I decided to finally retire my old self-written 'sticky notes' utility, and migrate all my notes to the built in Windows 10 Sticky Notes.

* My note app: ~3mb whilst running.

* Win10 Sticky Notes: ~22mb whilst running.

22mb might not be a lot of ram, but I do struggle to understand how it's using that much memory just to display small squares with text in them...

...

Anecdote: Two hours later, whilst trying to copy-paste text from one note to another, I lost the text completely, and Sticky Notes crashed... ~sigh~ back to my crappy app then...

csydas• 9 years ago

Probably because the Sticky Notes on Windows 10 has a bit more functionality built in. If I remember correctly, it has integration with other systems (including Outlook), so you can make a note and create a calendar event with said note.

Basically there's just a lot going on under the hood for many of these "simple" apps that isn't user facing. For better or for worse, that's why.

proactivesvcs• 9 years ago

"Stickes" from Zhorn Software currently running ~8MB private bytes. I've been using this software for...er...longer than I can actually remember. I don't recall it crashing once.

http://www.zhornsoftware.co.uk/stickies/

0xcde4c3db• 9 years ago

It's fine as long as the runtimes themselves are tiny and low-overhead. Most C and C++ programs carry around a mandatory "runtime", usually denoted by the module name "crt0". It's basically just a translation layer between the OS's executable calling conventions and main()/return that weighs a few dozen bytes and only runs during startup and exit of the app to do things like set up argc/argv/envp and put the exit code where the OS expects it. The C and C++ standard libraries provide many of the services that a framework runtime would otherwise provide, but they're usually much smaller than a modern "framework" and provided as part of the OS. Modern Windows desktop apps are supposed to install their own copies of the DLLs (msvcrXX.dll/msvcpXX.dll and friends). You can link against the "known DLL" msvcrt.dll, but I don't think linking to it is officially supported for any non-ancient version of Visual C++, and IIRC it has a bunch of carefully preserved bugs for backward compatibility. Maybe there should be something like musl for Windows?

I'd actually like to see an interface for micro controller style apps. Like An 8 bit AVR emulator that could do some kernel syscalls to the hosted environment. It would allow for a class of apps to be written that would have a fixed memory footprint. There's some Irony here in that this would also be a runtime.

As rebootthesystem suggests, this sounds a lot like a niche that would be well-served by a purpose-built Forth interpreter. Such interpreters have been used to e.g. facilitate interactive development or hot-patching on actual microcontrollers and other constrained systems. There's a surprising amount of symmetry with Lisp systems, but the traditions of Forth tend to value small code for both application and implementation. There's probably nothing preventing a tiny Lisp from filling the same role.

ethagnawl• 9 years ago

This calls to mind: http://suckless.org/

Home of dwm, dmenu and other quality software with a focus on simplicity, clarity, and frugality.

dkersten• 9 years ago

I love dmenu, its tiny and to the point and just works.

sundvor• 9 years ago

The apps may be tiny, but the website itself is (also) a breath of fresh air from times past.

mi100hael• 9 years ago

I ruefully sort of wish CSS was 100% client side so that all sites would be delivered as plain, unstyled HTML and it would be entirely up to the user how they prefer to see content. Obviously not at all practical, but would make it so much cleaner and easier to read when browsing 90% of sites out there.

steanne5• 9 years ago

the old presto version of opera had an option to default to user css for the whole program instead of the various sites'. don't know if that's still available in the new version.

est• 9 years ago

Missing this

http://www.bcheck.net/apps/hoe.htm

customized hotkey launcher.

Written in assembly I believe. You can modify it far beyond bosskey.

j_s4• 9 years ago

Paging HN user miles!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12985672

I'm afraid (or perhaps the word I'm looking for is "glad" ;-) that the Internet has passed tinyapps.org on by. After its fleeting 15 seconds of fame back in 2001 (thanks to a Slashdotting and tiny blurb in Wired), the site has mainly served as an irregular tech blog lo these many years.

miles3• 9 years ago

Ha! Thanks so much for the kind shout-out, j_s - what a memory you have! Glad to see my humble corner of the web is still of some small interest ;-)

j_s4• 9 years ago

Clearly there is still tremendous interest in the type of efficient software you curated so well back in the day. So many of the programs still work fine today even though their original websites are long gone -- a testament to minimal dependencies, your efforts to archive local copies, and Microsoft's commitment to backwards compatibility!

Your blog is always a breath of fresh air any time I happen to stumble by one of your solutions in response to searching for help. Definitely one of my "trusted" sources - don't ever let that domain expire!

unexistance• 9 years ago

interested 10 years ago, still do to this day :D

great job Miles

jaclaz3• 9 years ago

Longtime supporter of tinyapps.org. Go, Miles, go!

EGreg• 9 years ago

How did you know he mentioned you?

Is there some sort of @mention bookmarklet/browser extension in HN?

j_s4• 9 years ago

Although it was "removed due to copyright violations"[1] in 2003, TinyWindowsGames.com was a work of art. If you don't mind downloading random binaries you can still grab them via the Internet Archive. I will see if I can create a new screenshot of the playable, tiny thumbnail near the system tray (probably microscopic at today's resolutions).

https://web.archive.org/web/20030618002602/http://www.tinywi...

[1] Nintendo reported us to some software theft agency over "Tiny Donkey Kong" (I forget what the agency was called) and that got us threatened us with scary emails. We tried to protest that we just supplied emulators, and not ROM images, but it fell on deaf ears and we were too young and intimidatable to stand our ground. It's a shame, since it was a popular site in its day.

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/alt.comp.freeware/yKQBaHgjGD...

wolfgke• 9 years ago

Which shows that copyright is a form of censorship.

dahauns• 9 years ago

Well, that's what it was invented for...

j_s4• 9 years ago

Apparently some of the games are in the system tray.

http://imgur.com/a/CuA6e

girvo• 9 years ago

I miss GameHippo. Back when I had dial-up and a Pentium 100mhz with 16mb of RAM, it was the best place to download tiny games that would actually run; and it's why I got into programming -- a README with one of the games said a single person wrote it in Pascal, and that gave me the inspiration to learn to program myself!

movetheworld• 9 years ago

Besides the file size restriction of 1.4 MB, I agree 100% with the requirements for good OS software. Portability and ad/junk-free is most important.

kierenj• 9 years ago

Quite a few links and sites offline - e.g. the top network tool, the top text tool.. :(

coldcode• 9 years ago

You can write all sorts of tiny apps. We need to have 100 people just to tell the other 100 people what process to follow, how to write everything, what it should look like, etc. Plus another 100 people to run the process. Also another 100 people to manage those people. Bonus: the following version in this monster must be complete before the previous version is even live. No tiny for us...

iso-8859-1• 9 years ago

An even tinier approach would be to compute the Nix closure size of packages. That way, you'd pay for your libc implementation too.

e12e• 9 years ago

Hm, looks like there are some old links - pfe (programmers file editor) links to sites.net, not the official homepage:

http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/~steveb/cpaap/pfe/default.htm

satysin• 9 years ago

Tiny, single exe (and an ini for config) Windows programs have a special place in my heart. Perfectly portable, instant and lightweight.

I want to cry when I see simple software like Sticky Notes in Windows 10 using dozens of MB of memory and have a 30+MB install size with minimal functionality.

I don't have a big issue with .NET and Java based apps but I seem to be using more and more Electron based software and while the software isn't bad it sucks that every program comes with its own bloated framework :(

maxpert• 9 years ago

Nostalgia (disclaimer I have moved on to Linux)

squarefoot3• 9 years ago

Ninite also follows an interesting concept and saved me some good time in the past. Can be really useful if you need to install the same subset of apps on more machines. https://ninite.com/

swiley• 9 years ago

I always love playing around with busybox, which is more or less the Linux equivalent to this. Small software is beautiful.

mherrmann2• 9 years ago

I wish it were easy to write such small apps, particular cross-platform. I'm developing a cross-platform file manager [1]. It's way more bloated with dependencies than I would like. But I can't justify spending time on trimming its dep's when there is so much functionality that needs to be implemented. Having said that, I did choose PyQt over Electron for performance reasons [2].

[1] https://fman.io

[2] https://fman.io/blog/picking-technologies-for-a-desktop-app-...

problems• 9 years ago

One thing that you seemingly missed in your review of toolkits is that PyQt cannot be used freely by a proprietary application such as yours. Qt itself is LGPL, PySide (the official python Qt binding) is also LGPL, but PyQt is GPL-only unless you pay them $500.

mherrmann2• 9 years ago

Fair point. Though tbh $500 really isn't that much in the context of how much work a desktop app is.

nom• 9 years ago

Perfect thread to mention AnyDesk, our remote desktop application. We practice minimalism as an art form, the size of the Windows executable is 1,8 MB. [0]

Disclaimer: Currently working at AnyDesk.

0: https://anydesk.com/platforms

to3m• 9 years ago

I've written a few small no-dependency things like this for Windows. Some random notes on writing them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11011857

These are all no-dependency, and all <100KBytes:

Keyboard layout switcher for Windows: https://github.com/tom-seddon/kbswitch

Windows window manipulation tools, for use with AutoHotKey: https://github.com/tom-seddon/align_window2, https://github.com/tom-seddon/align_window3, https://github.com/tom-seddon/dispswitch

Snack-size Windows clock: https://github.com/tom-seddon/NotifyClock

I think the large ones are only as large as they are because they statically link with the CRT. I used to do the full /NODEFAULTLIB /OPT:NOWIN98 thing, and leave out the CRT entirely, so the EXEs were tiny and had no dependencies - but this was a bit of a pain to work with. And dynamically linking with the CRT caused me a couple of deployment problems here and there, since I used to share my binaries folder between several PCs in the past. So eventually I settled on the purely no-dependency option: statically linking with the CRT, and ignoring the EXE size. The average app just isn't made meaningfully larger in the grand scheme of things by this, and by modern standards it barely even counts as measurable. Even if it's a tiny app, and now 10x larger, it might still be only 90KBytes...

fizgig2• 9 years ago

I love the minimal and efficient app mindset.

Back in the 90s I used this DOS text editor that fit on a single floppy sector (512B). I forget the name, but it was a part of my standard toolkit for many years.

These days, I run "evilwm" for my home desktop. That's about as small and efficient as a DE/WM gets anymore, and I love it.

lsh6• 9 years ago

this evilwm? http://www.6809.org.uk/evilwm/

fizgig2• 9 years ago

Yes.

Tiny Apps

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