Forum - Banjo Ben Clark

Banjo Ben concept app

#1

(Please excuse the clickbaity title; I just wanted to do something like that.) I changed the title because… well… it looked weird.

I’m sure that many people, especially those who are learning from a mobile device, have wondered, “Why doesn’t Ben have an app?”

Well.

I happen to be a programmer, and I like to exercise my programming by writing small, stupid apps sometimes. Once it was a small level app for my phone; another time it was a fractal viewer. This time around, I decided to make a Banjo Ben concept app. Below is a link to a video of the app in operation (I would have uploaded it here as a GIF, but it was too big). Please note that the loading screen shown here takes longer that it probably actually would in real life.

Some questions that are likely to become FAQs:

Is that real data pulled from the website?

No. This is simply placeholder data.

Can you modify the app to actually use real data?

Short answer: No.

Long answer: While it technically would be possible to make the app download real webpages from banjobenclark.com and scrape data from them to figure out what data the site has right now, it would be very hard. Therefore, unless the person or people responsible for setting up the website implement an interface that allows apps like mine to access site data, I’m definitely not going to add real data.

Why does your mouse pointer look that way? I’ve never seen anything like that before.

I’m using the Linux operating system and you should too.

Can I get the app?

Short answer: No.

Long answer: My app is running on Linux. That being said, I could theoretically make it run on Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS as well. However, there are various reasons that I’m not going to do so:

  • I don’t have any Apple devices and don’t want any.
  • I don’t have a Windows developer environment set up right now.
  • Even if I had Apple devices, to make the app available for iOS, I would have to pay a $100 fee per year. This is ridiculously expensive; Apple should be ashamed of itself for doing that. Google Play is a bit better at a one-time $25 fee, but that’s still more than I want to pay to make a concept app available.
  • I don’t feel like doing it.

I may eventually make the source code available to everybody; however, I’m not doing so at the moment. Anyway, it’s not much to play with; why do you want to watch a loading screen and then scroll around on one small boring page?

Is this going to be a real thing?

This concept was created entirely without the knowledge of Ben; therefore, I have no idea what is going to show up in the future. If Ben wants to offer an app, great; if not, well, you have this random concept app to look at and say “If only…”

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#2

There’s been talk about a Banjo Ben app, I hope it happens one day :smiley: I think it might have been teased as coming with a site remodel, but I’m not sure if that plan’s still alive… it would be super cool though!

On a side note, do you think there are real benefits to learning and using Linux if you’re not doing any hardcore programming/coding? Because it seems like such a cool OS, but probably not incredibly practical for a layman like me :joy:

6 Likes
#3

@Michael_Mark OK, you asked for it!

Linux is very practical for all users. Admittedly, the second article I linked1 does focus more towards developers, but the other two pages give reasons for “normal users” to use Linux:

  • It’s secure. How? There are multiple reasons:
    • Since Linux is open source, anybody who wants can do a security audit of the source code and inform the developers of any bugs or security holes found. This is commonly referred to as Linus’s law, named after Linus Torvalds, the original creator of Linux.
    • Most Linux distributions provide software via online repositories; in other words, they provide a sort of app store for you to download all your software from instead of making you scour the internet for individual, unverified installers like Windows has done for decades2. In fact, Linux distributions pioneered the concept of central software repositories or app stores long before Apple and Google did so.
    • Most computer viruses target Windows, since it is the most used PC OS; therefore, Linux is largely free from such concerns.
  • It’s free! Very few Linux distributions require you to pay for their use; most or all of those that do are charging money for customer support rather than for the software (and most to all of them have free versions available; for example, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has a free clone called Rocky Linux).
  • It supports old hardware. Microsoft has taken a lot of flak over its stringent hardware requirements for Windows 11; meanwhile, developers keep modern Linux working on such platforms as the Nintendo 64 and computers from the 1990s. I don’t expect you to be watching Ben’s lessons on a beast that originally ran Windows 95, but Linux will certainly keep your older PC working long past the Windows 10 cutoff date.
  • It supports lots of software. Linux has native versions of many great apps, including pretty much every browser out there; however, if you can’t find the app you want, you may want to give Wine a whirl to keep your Windows apps running3.
  • It’s user friendly. Many people think of Linux as an operating system that requires you to become proficient in use of a terminal; on the contrary, there is a plethora of distributions that provide good-looking, easy-to-use interfaces that are capable of emulating Windows, macOS, or pretty much anything you want it to look like.

There are so many other reasons to use Linux that I won’t list them all; if you want to learn more of them, check out the three articles in my first post and then keep looking around on the Internet.

Footnotes:

1If you look closely, the words “you should too” in my original post actually each link to separate pages.
2I know that Microsoft has the Windows store, but that really hasn’t been very widely adopted by developers.
3Unfortunately, Wine doesn’t work with every app out there; however, thanks to efforts by Codeweavers and Valve, support is getting better every day.

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#4

(Voodoo logic)-
My brain often has sensory overload from trying to learn the banjo.
Sensory overload from learning Linux just might prove to be the distraction my banjo brain needs.

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#5

My random note. I actually saw Linus Torvalds speak at a conference (Digital Equipment Corp Users Symposium) in 1994 or 95. Digital was trying to court the open source OS in an attempt to stop their downward company spiral. There was a post event social gathering and he walked me talking to someone. Just kind of a starstruck moment back in my early sysadmin days.

Good luck with app programming. I’ve thought many times about learning a modern programming language (I’m was a pre-gui programmer in C, Pascal, Fortean) for phone apps but I decided I’d rather stick with learning mandolin.

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#6

Not something that would interest me.

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