Housyl - The Household App!

After a good few months of work, I am happy to announce my newest public Wappler project, Housyl, which is now in public beta. Housyl is an app designed for those that live with others, whether that be an entire family, roommates, or partners, by helping keep your household organized.

Housyl is available via the web, at https://app.housyl.com, or via a PWA with push notification support for Android, iOS, MacOS and Windows (and anywhere else you can get your PWA's to run). PWA versions of the app will be put on both the play and app store in the coming months as I continue to add features. A native app is planned for the future.

One of the core features of Housyl is that it's celebrative. As a user, you can be a part of your own household, or join someone else's. You can be in as many households as you wish, and easily switch between them with the click of a button.

Housyl currently have 4 main apps (with more to come in the future)

  • Calendar
  • Notes
  • Shopping Lists
  • To-do Lists

Some of the site wide features:

  • Receive app wide notifications via either the Site, Email, Push or Discord. You can toggle individual notification preferences from your account settings.
  • Full permissions system for the household owner, allowing them to change who can access which apps.
  • App available via PWA (Native soon)

Just some of the individual app features:

Calendar (overview preview):

  • Choose who receives notifications per event
  • Create repeat events at either daily, weekly, monthly or yearly intervals.
  • Customizable notification fire times and sources per event (Imgur: The magic of the Internet)
  • Syncs with to-do items

Notes (note view preview)

  • Create notes for either the entire household, or just select household members
  • Full formatting via WYSIWYG editor

Shopping Lists (list view preview)

  • Create an unlimited amount of shopping lists, either for the entire household or just select household members
  • Able to specify a product link and quantity
  • Create personal Item Groups, which are collections of items, which can then be easily added to existing or new shopping lists (perfect for repeat weekly items)

To-do (list view preview)

  • Create an unlimited amount of to-do lists, either for the entire household or just select household members.
  • Add comments to individual items to note down anything that might be relevant
  • Create in-depth descriptions for lists using WYSIWYG editor
  • Set a priority level for individual items
  • Set a due date for individual items. Items with a due date also display on the calendar, providing you have access.

User Management

  • Create a household invite code, which other users can use to request to join the household
  • Approve/Kick household members
  • Change permissions for individual household members
  • Rename/delete household

All current features of the app will remain free, forever. All but 1 future planned apps within Housyl are also planned to be free.

Thanks for checking out the thread! Feel free to register an account to take a look around. You can delete your account at any time (or download your data) from the account settings page.

App: https://app.housyl.com
Landing Page: https://housyl.com (to be remade at end of beta)

P.s (User guides are not currently accessible as I'm still working on them, they'll be out soon)

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Great idea @Digo!

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Nice Work

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Excellent idea and very well executed. Would be great to hear some info on how easy you found various elements of the app like the PWA configuration.

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By far the hardest part of the app was the calendar functionality. Wappler's FullCalendar integration is a little basic if you want to go the route of implementing repeat events on a basis other than weekly because RRule isn't implemented, and you can't hook into the Wappler instance if you add it to the page.

I had to redo the logic about 3 times to get it correctly functional, and ended up settling on using rrule within RunJS on the server connect side. There are still a couple bugs to iron out, but I have an update to push in the next couple of days that fixes all the remaining ones.

The PWA aspect was actually pretty simple. I considered using progressier, but as someone who self-hosts everything and anything, I had a hard time accepting a monthly subscription and more importantly, relying on another external service so ended up taking the time to implement it myself all from scratch, except for the pwa-install poup which uses pwa-install

Aside from Wappler, the stack and components used are:

  • Redis (along with Bull)
  • MariaDB
  • kutt (for the link shortening service, self-hosted. Might end up just implementing my own service in the future.)
  • [Wappler Ext] web-push (a slightly modified version)
  • [Wappler Ext] GeoIP-Lite
  • [Wappler Ext] User Agent Parser
  • [Wappler Ext] RunJS (Used a LOT in place of creating custom extensions)
  • [Wappler Ext] Sanitize HTML
  • [Wappler Ext] Create/Write/Append Files (Used for data exports)

Plus a couple more I'm sure I'm missing, and a good few custom extensions I haven't yet published.

I do plan on publishing the PWA to app stores. For Android, PWA's wrapped in bubblewrap already support handling push notifications so there really isn't much more that's needed to do, but on the IOS side, it doesn't, and I'll need to implement push notifications via firebase.

There's a good bit of polishing that I need to finish before officially launching the app outside of beta, especially with push notifications to get things running a bit smoother. If people are interested, I could create a more detailed post going into exactly how I got around a lot of issues I found along with how I'm hosting everything.

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Looks great..! Theres a lot of work there, good job :slight_smile:

I had the same issues as you, I needed to use a link shortener for an app but didnt want to pay subs to anyone, I created my own here:

There was more work there than I'd planned for but the end result is great. I can hook my own app into the R16 API and it all works perfectly.

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Why has this not been showcased, Tom? Excellent site and service.

And if it has, how did I miss it?!

Thanks for that @sitestreet it was showcased a while ago, its in the list here:

Full info is here:

It's been working a treat, the API performs brilliantly, which was the main purpose of its creation.

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Yeah, it's definitely on my agenda to create something just like this to wrap into all my projects, but with already having two (soon three) more projects being worked on and in the pipeline it's on the back burner for now, hence settling with Kutt which is free and self-hosted. It's open source so I can make any edits I need, though I haven't needed to just yet.

I've just finished remaking the landing page for the app in Wappler: https://housyl.com/

It's basic, but that's all that's really needed for now until I get the apps published. Fun fact: The landing page is hosted on the same project as the app rather than having two separate projects, using NGINX for the reverse proxy for the correct paths/urls, which is great for load balancing as I don't have to load balance two different apps (when applied soon).

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Looks good. Hope it works out well. Think you could present it in a monthly meetup? Get more exposure... :slight_smile:

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