[mafuyu]

About page: https://deskthing.app/about

Looks like a project to open up Spotify’s discontinued Car Thing to homebrew apps.

If the devs are reading this: the GitHub README and homepage both don’t have a description of what the project is. I had to click around for a while until I found the about page.

[Uehreka]

This is like the 20th Cool Thing that I’ve seen posted on HN that could be explained by a photo and yet the creators seemingly didn’t even think to take one (despite building out a whole website and everything). How does this keep happening?

[riprod]

CDNs are expensive and annoying to work with ngl

I also just posted a few images - the GUI has changed so much over the last couple months that any photo I would've taken would be outdated as of now. There's a lot of content on the subreddit though!

[sheepybloke]

I was thinking the same thing! I was looking all through the repo and site to see if they had any pictures of the apps running, or a setup using the device. To me, this is the easiest way to sell your project and show how cool it is!

[synalx]

Without knowing what Car Thing was, I read all 3 of those pages and still have no idea what this project is.

[drdaeman]

Even knowing what it is, and having a Car Thing somewhere in a box in a closet, I still don't have any idea what this DeskThing thing is.

Some Chromium shell with yet-another-appstore that can somehow show (or maybe control) Spotify, Discord and weather, with Trello and Audible planned is my best guess. I guess, a couple screenshots or photos would've done wonders in this regard.

Either way, I fail to understand why I might prefer a separate low-power device to do something with the apps I can already see and control from desktop. But I'm glad someone found a use case for their Car Thing.

[edfletcher_t137]

The utter lack of screenshots doesn't help either. I also read those pages and am also still unsure of what this is.

[weaksauce]

it is a opensource-crime to opensource something with a ui and not have a single screenshot of what the thing actually is.

[riprod]

TBF... this has just been a personal passion project for me. I'm new to the OS scene and just did this for fun - not expecting people to actually use or be interested in it as much as they are.

I'm just a guy who hasn't even graduated college yet ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Cheers

[65]

I'm not sure how someone manages to make an entire project like this and provide absolutely zero pictures of it. Almost impressive how someone can just completely forget the most important thing to get people to understand what your project actually does.

[zephyreon]

I have a CarThing and managed to get this working on it after several attempts and it is actually pretty good. If they revamp the website and README it really has the potential to take off.