Ockam VS simpletask-android

disclosure: I work at Ockam.

The Portals for Mac app is an example of the type of thing you could build using the open source stack of protocols. The README (linked by parent) links out to all of the relevant parts of the protocol documentation to explain how these work together. The NAT Traversal (https://github.com/build-trust/ockam/blob/develop/examples/a...) part of the README is probably the best explanation of why the free relay you get via Ockam Orchestrator is a useful part of this demo.

As for why would anyone trust this: The protocols are designed so you absolutely don't have to trust the relay. Trust is pushed out to the edges that you control and so you're not susceptible to a MITM attack if something like a relay is compromised. The protocol design for all of this is open and documented, and was independently audited by (IMO) some of the best in the business, Trail of Bits: https://docs.ockam.io/reference/protocols.

🚀 Portals for Mac – A macOS app built in Swift that uses the Ockam Rust library to privately share a service on your Mac with anyone, anywhere. The service is shared securely over an end-to-end encrypted and mutually authenticated Ockam Portal. Your friends will have access to it on their localhost! This app is a great example of the kinds of things you can build with Ockam 👉

Ockam is a suite of programming libraries, command line tools, and managed cloud services to orchestrate end-to-end encryption, mutual authentication, key management, credential management, and authorization policy enforcement — all at massive scale. Ockam's end-to-end secure channels guarantee authenticity, integrity, and confidentiality of all data-in-motion at the application layer.

We’ve been working on something (https://github.com/build-trust/ockam) that enables exactly this, among a whole host of other use cases. If you check out some of the code examples in the docs you’ll see how to setup a tunnel using the CLI.

For other use cases there’s also the programming libraries (only Rust atm, though I was spiking a TypeScript/Node PoC this week) which might provide more flexibility. Personally I’m excited by the idea of being able to move this kind of secure by design connectivity all the way into the application layer though.

If you're not already an active contributor to an open source project or two it can seem very daunting. You don't want to do the wrong thing and embarrass yourself. Remove that anxiety for people by giving them an easy way to do something low risk. Matt did that a couple of years ago by creating a long-lived issue for people to simply say hello. That's it. Say hi, introduce yourself. It's a safe place to make a first step.

Google Task → simpleTask

Simpletask (WebDAV) (version 11.0.0): A todo manager based on todo.txt

I was using OSMAnd the other day. Wanted to change a setting that I knew exists, since I looked through them all at one point (don't remember which one off hand, sorry). Spent 2 or 3 minutes looking for it before I ran out of time and gave up. Not the first time this has happened (second or third, I think).

On the developer side, too many interrelated settings can increase the complexity of the code, making it less maintainable.

My favorite compromise is to use settings for the most common functionality tweaks, and then add script hooks to allow extensive customization of behavior. The Android app Simpletask[1] does a great job of this, imo. (There are many places where it could use polish, but it nails the overall approach).

[1]: https://github.com/mpcjanssen/simpletask-android

SIMPLETASK A simple task list manager that strives to have just enough features to do GTD (the Getting Things Done methodology), but no more. Based on the todo.txt app so all info is stored in a single text file called todo.txt.