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mafuyu | 1 year ago

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.

discuss

Uehreka|1 year ago

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|1 year ago

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posted a few images - the GUI has changed so much over the last couple months that any photo I would've taken would be outdated as of now.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|1 year ago

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|1 year ago

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

drdaeman|1 year ago

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|1 year ago

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

zephyreon|1 year ago

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.