Over My Head

General Discussion
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Greetings, Tidbyt folk.

I’ve received my Tidbyt and as expected, it’s beautiful and very cool. Congrats on delivering a really cool project! That being said, I think I expected something a little more… hmm… robust, maybe? More complete, less open source.

Admittedly, I am not a developer and maybe I misunderstood the true purpose of the Tidbyt, if in fact, it’s for people to develop their own apps more than for people like me to simply display a bunch of different information in my office/studio (in my case). The things I was looking for… news headlines, sports scores, etc. plus some cool one offs like ‘now playing’ on Spotify, maybe my calendar and whatnot are pretty limited.

The two I really wanted that you do sort of have…

I want the news headlines… But I want more sources, not just NYT and BBC, and only one story to display ever (to be fair, I don’t want the text of the story to display at all… just the headlines, much like you’d see in Times Square or something).

For the ‘American Football’ scores, the ability to track a team is nice… but nowhere near the scope of what a sports fan wants, which is all the scores from across the league, and a schedule of upcoming games, betting lines, etc. And that would include the other leagues too, not just the NFL. MLB, NBA, NHL etc. in addition to college sports are definitely necessary.

Again, thinking I misunderstood the main purpose of the product. It’s really, really cool and obviously has a ton of potential. Just wondering if the plan is to expand the offerings for those of us who can’t actually, you know, build the stuff we want. Ha.

Thank you! Congrats again!

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The product is still in very early development and definitely still has a long way to go in terms of app scope and support. However, just because you’re not a developer doesn’t mean it’s a negative. Tidbyt has recently made a community repo for apps that developers like myself are making. My recommendation is that if you have an idea or request of how to make an app better or even a completely new idea, request it and a one of the Tidbyt developers or freelance devs might pick it up if it gets enough traction :slight_smile:

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Me and a few others are using the Tydbit to learn how to code! If you’re interested in learning I can provide a link to getting started on windows!

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Hey @Ckradio961 - so sorry the Tidbyt has not lived up to your expectations and we totally hear you on wanting more out of your Tidbyt. Our kitschy slogan is “see what matters” and we know that what matters to someone is deeply personal.

Tidbyt is certainly not a product targeted only for software folks. We see opening up to other developers as a mechanism to allow people to build apps for deeply personalized use cases they have and quite frankly at a much faster pace then we can deliver on our own :sweat_smile: .

For sports and news - totally hear you. Folks want so much more out of our current offering and we’re committed to adding more apps and more features to existing apps as fast as we can.

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I think the biggest and most useful thing that could be done for the platform would be native support for things like IFTTT and Zapier. This would enable people who are far less technical to be able to easily integrate another platform into their Tidbyt without the need for a custom application.

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Oh please don’t misunderstand… it’s not that it hasn’t lived up to my expectations as much as I think I expected something slightly different, far as being ready out of the box for “normal” users. Someone suggested some kind of support for something like IFTTT and Zapier. I think that’s a great idea. They’re totally within my realm of experience. I’m not entirely sure how that could work, but something a little more drag and drop, when it comes to building “apps” would be just incredible.

All that being said, as someone suggested, maybe it’s a good opportunity to start learning some actual coding. I’m not entirely worthless with stuff like this, it’s just quite a step up from where I am currently. Maybe that could be fun to learn. Or in the interim, finding a few people who know what they’re doing to build some stuff would be great too. Ha.

Regardless, it’s a cool gadget and I’m excited about all that it will ultimately become. Happy to be in at the ground floor!

Thanks again

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I’d love to give it a rip. That said, I’m all Mac these days, so a Windows link probably wouldn’t help. Ha thanks though!!

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Ohhh you got it easy then buddy! Thats the easiest of all available options. Feel free to see the instructions on the Github Page if you get intersted!