crux VS screenshooting

Another (also Rust-based) cross-platform mobile app dev kit is crux [1]. I've never used it, but the core idea of "true native UIs with a shared business logic core via IPC" seems like the sweet spot to my mostly untrained sensibilities.

[1] https://redbadger.github.io/crux/

Jason - great work here. Your Swift code looks like mine :) on this, some folks in the UK have created Crux - an interesting abstraction layer for mobile apps using Rust. Might provide some ideas for optimisation/ipc. https://github.com/redbadger/crux

Recently, I stumbled upon a project at the Rust London conference that caught my eye. It's called Crux, and it's a library that helps you implement a functional core and imperative shell paradigm. In other words, it allows you to separate your app logic from your UI code, and share it between platforms.

Long time ago, I did sth similar, i.e. made a screenshot every few seconds, with the purpose to automatically extract information from it, e.g. how long I was using some app.

I wrote a PNG DB to split PNG images into many blocks and have each block stored in a DB. If there are several equal blocks, it is only stored once. Via a hash table, the lookup for such blocks is made fast. With this PNG DB, I have a compression rate of about 400-500%. https://github.com/albertz/png-db

Some of the scripts I used to analyze the screenshots are here, but in the end, it was not really so successful and reliable: https://github.com/albertz/screenshooting

In the end, that lead to another project, where I just was storing that information more directly, i.e. what application was in the foreground, what file was open. https://github.com/albertz/timecapture