buibuibui

I am a big fan of Signals. It’s the best state-management concept I've come across (also my team-mates). We even use it outside of the frontend space, e.g. in long running instances / services or complicated numpy calculations. One of the core characteristics why it's so easy to reason about, is that the reactivity is indeed synchronous. We know most of the time, what every signal set() does when we constraint ourselves Effects not allowing to set other Signals.

Integrating async as first class citizen into the core is indeed interesting. I wonder how it impacts the ergonomics and state reasoning in the end.

Need to test it out.

ScreenWall builder here. Thank you so much for the wonderful feedbacks! Please keep an eye open on the website! I will publish a self-hosted version soon and open source! Keeping old-devices from beeing thrown away is my number one priority here! They deserve a second life.

Hey, owner here. I think it‘s wonderful that you find it useful! Your questions has been answered in the comments already, because some people asked the same. But I think what you probably want is a way to use this without a cloud and run this locally in your network. Please keep an eye open on the website! I will publish a self-hosted version soon! Keeping old-devices from beeing thrown away is my number one priority here!

Please keep an eye open on the website! I will publish a self-hosted version soon.

I am interested to hear what features you guys want in the next iterations! While building ScreenWall, I actually had art installations, home dashboards and train depature info screens in mind. Interacting with the screens and triggering events across other screens is also in the pipeline. Would be cool, if you can give me some crazy ideas, so I can prepare the client runtime better.

This is work in progress project of mine! I have so many ideas how I can make it better, but before I overengineer it just for myself (I think this is typicial engineer mentality), I wanted to submit it to HN before I lose my interest over time, like my other projects…

The account mechanism is just used to scope the devices to „walls“. Otherwise I don‘t mine anything. But I share your sentiment, that this should maybe a self-hostable tool.

I see you. I am thinking about providing a self-hosted version.

An account is necessary to couple your devices to your wall. And auth is implemented via Better-Auth. I stopped Codex immediately when he tried to implement the login stuff from scratch. :)

You can also vibe-code your widget if you want! You are not restricted to use the built-in ones. Just copy the "Canvas Widget Guide" you find under "Left Sidebar > Create > Smart Widget > Tutorial" and copy that article in ChatGPT or Claude while describing what your widget should display.

Then paste the code to "Create > Smart Widget > Edit the Code" in the Widget Details. (this flow should be more intuitive...)

You are able to send JSON data to your widget via an API.

It's all just canvas and old Javascript code!

I like the wall position detection feature via markers! :)

Oh wow, although I submitted it some days ago, I somehow got on the front page! Thanks for that! Also as a note: this platform is nowhere near finished! I had this idea in my mind for a long time that I wanted to reuse my old phones and tablets as displays in my home. I also know that finding the right apps for these old platforms is a challenge in itself, that's why I went the route of creating an ES5 (that nobody writes anymore!) web app that most of these devices still support. The client's whole purpose is to display canvas and media files that the server dictates on-demand via websocket, while keeping a synchronized clock. On Instagram I always saw these very cool widgets like retro clocks, split-flip boards, YouTube subscriber counters that I felt urged to buy. But I thought to myself that the old phones I already have could also do the same. I am a long-time software engineer myself, but could never take the time to validate whether my ideas work. So I thought, why not try it out with Codex. After long prompting, supervising and correcting, I got a very usable solution that I now pleasantly use myself at home.

The oldest device I found that works with ScreenWall as a widget display, is an iPad 3 (2012)!