DAdavidascher·Oct 6, 2013
In Appmakermozilla-appmaker
appmaker
HTML2013–2013
mozilla-appmaker / appmaker · Archived
appmaker
Appmaker was an exploration in making app authoring available to non-developers
2Distinct people
5Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
429GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Appmaker was an exploration in making app authoring available to non-developers
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- mozilla/appmaker-words · linked in 3 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 12:54:37 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by hour5 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2013-10-05 21:03:13 UTC to 2013-10-06 04:50:21 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 5, 21:00 | 2013-10-05 21:00:00 UTC | 2013-10-05 22:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| Oct 5, 22:00 | 2013-10-05 22:00:00 UTC | 2013-10-05 23:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Oct 5, 23:00 | 2013-10-05 23:00:00 UTC | 2013-10-06 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Oct 6, 00:00 | 2013-10-06 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-10-06 01:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Oct 6, 01:00 | 2013-10-06 01:00:00 UTC | 2013-10-06 02:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Oct 6, 02:00 | 2013-10-06 02:00:00 UTC | 2013-10-06 03:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Oct 6, 03:00 | 2013-10-06 03:00:00 UTC | 2013-10-06 04:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Oct 6, 04:00 | 2013-10-06 04:00:00 UTC | 2013-10-06 05:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
5 sourcesYeah, not yet ready for primetime. This hasn't launched yet, and won't for a while. But you can look under the hood:
https://github.com/mozilla/appmaker
and check out where we're intending to go:
https://github.com/mozilla/appmaker-words/wiki
In AppmakerWe care, we really do -- just haven't gotten around to that part yet!
Filed as https://github.com/mozilla/appmaker/issues/387, thanks.
We're actually very interested in mobile browsers, so much so that in fact we've got plans (with no code to back them up yet) to let people author apps wholly on a phone.
In AppmakerWhoa. Definitely wasn't ready for HN-style exposure.
As bmoskowitz pointed out we have some rough words about the project. For this group, I'd in particular point out the roadmap and CONTRIBUTORS.md documents on the github repo:
https://github.com/mozilla/appmaker/blob/master/ROADMAP.md
https://github.com/mozilla/appmaker/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md
I wrote some earlier words at https://github.com/mozilla/appmaker-words/wiki, but that's quite possibly out of date.
At the highest level, we're exploring whether it's possible to make a tool that lets non-devs (_not_ you folks!) who currently see their phones as a pure engine of consumption, as a place where they can create something fun or useful.
It's very, very early software, and it's public mostly because a) we kinda don't know how to do anything else, and b) we're going to us
Read the rest
e early and frequent user feedback to correct the aim on the product.
If people are interested, we're more than happy to entertain questions either here or on github, irc, the mailing list, etc.
Oh, and yeah, many of the components are broken, brittle, etc. This is still just a prototype.
That said, we're getting positive reactions from people close to our target audience, such as high school teachers, people teaching others how to make their first app, etc.
I'm sure we have loads of x-browser compatibility bugs, as well as known issues with respect to accessibility, absent localization, no great mechanism for contributing new components, and many more.
Oh, and the gamification bits in particular were really just testing the gamification APIs -- the levels we have in place are deeply unuseful =).
From someone peripherally involved in the project:
This is an open source project, community-built from the beginning. It's pre-alpha. Pre-pre alpha, even. There has been no public launch or fanfare. That's why you'll see no blog posts or explanatory text yet, why many of the components don't work, and why the tutorials aren't built.
But it's cool to see that it's already found its way to HN.
It's meant to be like Hypercard for mobile apps.
If you want to learn more, check out the repo:
https://github.com/mozilla/appmaker
or the vision stub / wiki:
https://github.com/mozilla/appmaker-words/wiki
In Appmaker