Snapgrove: a photo sharing app for friends and followers

Snapgrove: a photo sharing app for friends and followers

00 Markdown

Profiles with a grid of photos, follows, a home feed that keeps scrolling, likes and comments that update live, notifications, and an explore page.

Run it yourself

Get the finished app on your own machine, ready to change however you like.

VS Code Command Palette⇧⌘P
snapgrove -scaffold=elementscode/demo-snapgrove

Press 'Enter' to confirm your input or 'Escape' to cancel

Press ⇧⌘P in VS Code and choose Elements: New App. Then paste this line and press Enter.

New to Elements? Install Elements first.

The code

How it's built

Snapgrove needed photo uploads, a feed that keeps loading as you scroll, likes and comments that show up on every open copy of a post, and a notification badge that fills in on its own. Each of those is a part of Elements, so the agent spent its 23 minutes on the app itself.

What Elements gave the app

  • A feed that keeps scrolling. The home feed is a LiveTable for each reader, read with a keyset window, so it loads six posts at a time as you scroll.
  • Live comments and notifications. Comments and notifications are LiveTables. A comment appears on every open copy of the post as it is written, and database triggers on likes, comments and follows fill the notification badge.
  • Live counts. A channel pushes each post's like and comment counts to every page showing it.
  • Photo uploads as function calls. The new post page sends the photo to an @rpc as a File, the app stores it in the database, and a route serves each image under its content hash with a year-long cache.
  • Data from SQL files. Two migrations define the schema and its triggers, then seed eight friends who follow each other, 50 photo posts, 209 likes, 88 comments and a few unread notifications each, with the seed photos shipped as image assets.
  • Sessions. Every change runs as the signed-in user, so a like or a comment always carries the right name.

What the project server gave the agent

The project server runs alongside the agent and answers as soon as a file is saved: it type-checks the templates, TypeScript and SQL, applies migrations and reruns the tests, so every question came back right away and the agent kept building.

What shipped

The app type-checks with zero errors and all 23 tests pass. Every page works on desktop and phone, and live updates arrive across tabs, such as likes, comments and the notification badge.

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