Building With Intent
I'm working on a new application called TinyFeeds, it's a native RSS feed reader. Sure there's thousands of those, but this one is mine and as such I'm being extremely intentional about how it's built.
I believe constraints breed innovation, and as such I've outlined a few constraints for myself in this project.
First off, the file size has to be 5MB or under for the shipped binary. This is inspired by Matt's Fits on a Floppy manifesto. I'm also inspired by the Palm Pilot apps I use on a daily basis, many of which are under 5MB. Maintaining a small file size makes you second guess the need for features, libraries, graphics, etc. In a world where Google Chrome secretly downloads an extra 4GB for a local LLM, I feel like small apps are sorely needed.
Second, the application is to be built in Rust and Iced. This constraint has forced me to finally dig in and learn Rust. The result is a fast, native application that has a high level of stability thanks to the tools used to build it.
Finally, no LLM generated code is to be used. This again forces me to actually learn the language, focus on code structure, and de-scope feature bloat. It also makes me feel proud of what I've built, something I never feel when using LLMs.
So how's it going? Great so far! As I mentioned, TinyFeeds is built intentionally for me and how I enjoy consuming RSS. With any feed reader I always filter by unread posts from today. I don't use folders, tags, bookmarks, etc. So that's exactly what TinyFeeds does:
- Reads your feeds from a simple .txt file
- Shows new stories from today
- Only shows a single story at a time
- Remembers what stories you've viewed so they aren't shown again
The UI has been designed to facilitate this. It's incredibly simple, but the layout is intentional.
TinyFeeds won't be for everyone, heck it might only be something I want, but that's the point! I find it a joy to use even in it's early state.
While it isn't ready yet, you can early trial it if you so desire by cloning from Codeberg and building it yourself (./build.sh). The app currently clocks in at 4MB when built with the build script!
After TinyFeeds, I plan to build similar apps focused on small size, performance and minimal feature sets. All hand coded. Possibly inspired by Palm OS apps :-P