I made a keyboard because I needed one and nothing on Android was built for blind users. I put it on GitHub because someone else might need one. Then I woke up this morning and Mastodon had eaten it.

New blog post — what overnight virality actually looks like from the inside, the TalkBack problem nobody else bothered solving, Flexy, and why I spent the day building instead of panicking.

https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/i-made-a-keyboard-nobody-asked-for-my-experience-making-taptype/

#TapType #Android #Accessibility #BlindTech

I Made a Keyboard Nobody Asked For: My Experience Making TapType — fireborn

@fireborn About the thing about not putting the source out there because of merge requests, I think Github lets you turn off pull requests, or you can just say pull requests will be ignored, I've seen other projects do that and its perfectly OK to do that.
@alexchapman i'll see if that really is an option. In the post I was just commenting on the original reasoning
@fireborn Ye and that's understandable, when you've got a shitload of other stuff you don't wanna be reviewing pull requests every hour lol. Oh and I just looked it up, there's a page on the GitHub docs about disabling PRs: https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/managing-your-repositorys-settings-and-features/enabling-features-for-your-repository/disabling-pull-requests
Disabling pull requests - GitHub Docs

You may wish to modify pull request access for your repository if you want to restrict contributions, or disable them entirely.

GitHub Docs
@alexchapman Good to know :) I didn't even think to look to be honest. It was messy, like I said, and dealing with prs was not on my list of things to do. For projects that I actually want collaboration on, I absolutely want prs. I'm 100% in favour of open source contributions and free software. It just so happened that in this particular case, GitHub was just my distribution method, like the play store or a dropbox link or an ftp download. It preserves old versions and was almost no friction for me because I was using git to manage the source anyway.
@fireborn @alexchapman y'all this is making me wanna turn off PRs on some of the repos I built more as smaller hobby projects, gosh darn it ha. Totally would get this feeling if your intent is to be just more experiment, left alone, code something, see where it takes you in learning and fun and the world doesn't need to leave you issues or PRs especially if you had just started it and put it out. Would be irritating TBH.
@Tamasg @alexchapman Issues, feature requests, bug reports are fine. Because I can choose what I do with them easier than I can with something that took a real person real time to put effort into making because they had to understand the undocumented hell that is android accessibility to make a well thought out request, or not and then I have to reject and have this back and fourth about why I won't be merging it.
@fireborn @alexchapman oof yeah! Tell me about it, all the random compose bugs I come across both at work and now when building the Android app... Yeah. Totally a hellscape. But one that if you do right, it can be good, it just requires hours of debugging sometimes and 30 app reinstalls on a phone. Ha, ha. Will read this post more after work, I'm glad you put that out.
@Tamasg @alexchapman compose is its own special hell
@fireborn @Tamasg Oh you mean that Jetpack Compose shit? Uggghh why do ya think I decided to go the Expo rout with my mobile Thrive app lol I still need to work on that at some point but other stuff's been getting in the way.
@alexchapman @Tamasg i thought about just going the route of xml views but ive figured out enough of compose's strangeness
@fireborn @Tamasg Oh right, that's good then. If only Google made things simpler like how Apple did with Swift lol.