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Ask HN: What software/app do you wish would exist?
46 points by aecorredor on Oct 30, 2019 | hide | past | favorite | 51 comments
Looking for some ideas about some stuff that might already kind of exist, but could be improved on in terms of features/UX. Also, it could be something completely new.


Something like https://anichart.net/Fall-2019 for western movies and TV series. What is coming out this year? What has come out in the past year? What was good in 2008. Far more titles, so filters and maybe recommendation engine important. Drive people to amazon, netflix signups etc for money.

A better way of discovering what book to read next. Amazon recommendations not browsable enough. Goodreads not assistive enough. Amazon recommendation dollars.


Does metacritic not work for this purpose for movies for you? It is what I use to do the things you list.


A tool that lets me do code reviews, but like really good and integrated. I use gitlab on a daily basis, but it's painstakingly slow and basically just lets me stare at text. Some of the below features may be available, but not satisfactory in my opinion:

- I want to see the changes in a directory tree that I can navigate through!

- I want to comment on any piece of code, not only changes and their surroundings!

- I want to hide things, or mark them as "seen", to be able to look at things in the order I want without any risk of losing progress!

- I want to be able to filter/sort by the "change type", e.g. Imports, renames, indentation changes etc.!

- I want the diff to be aware of programming semantics, e.g. know when a function just moved from one file to another, or I add a method overload and don't get a diff telling me I added a closing bracket and another whole method signature in the middle of the old method!

- Let me type code! I want to try out and propose changes!

- I want freedom editing my review before submitting it the way I have freedom editing my branches before committing it!

- I want to have single comments refer to ranges of changes, which aren't necessarily connected or in the same file!

- I want to easily see what happened to the changes since I reviewed them! (Not a clickable link "changed since then bla bla", show me right there!).

- And probably most important: It has to be fast! Hyperbole: Having to wait for the page to load for a minute for large diffs, and then having to wait another minute for all changes to _actually_ be visible is a no-go.

The available tooling is already very powerful, but it still frequently fails me and I believe having this be extremely polished would be a real productivity game changer. Maybe there are already some great tools? Last time I had to look over a huge amount of changes I resorted to a patch file; grepping away unnecessary changes like package renames etc and just deleting text lines I considered sufficiently reviewed.


delta-force.net does this I believe. Not free though!


Look for 1-star reviews of existing software, and make something that fixes those pain points.


I scraped Capterra awhile back with this intention. What I learned is that every business category (there are hundreds) had at least 3 market leaders with 4 or more stars.

That’s partially due to Capterra being incentive on behalf on the ads they run to have positive reviews up, but it could indicate also that we’ve reached a saturation point where the CRM for X niche has been largely filled.


Most of these would be posted by competitors :)


Simple to use command line utility to search for files and directories with matching names and/or content defined by strings or regex patterns.

All linux utils that do that require anal effort, comes with obscene syntax and demand obscure combination of multiple things to accomplish single task.

I always wanted to write my own one on python but never found time.


Have you tried fd yet? it's more intuitive than find.

https://github.com/sharkdp/fd


A decent online diagram creator. One that handles the layout in an automatic way, making it easy to insert new intermediate nodes without dragging everything around manually. Creating a good architecture diagram is currently an exercise in tedium. Many tools don't even snap / route arrows well.

Would be great if it allows data entry via either text or graphical UI. Basically, a modern version of DOT and DOTTY.


Have you seen PlantUML [1]? You create your diagrams in text in their DSL which is fairly intuitive.

There’s a hosted version of the rendering engine here [2] though it’s easy enough to run locally.

[1] http://plantuml.com/

[2] https://www.planttext.com/


Since you mention DOT (the GraphViz format, right?) have you tried viz-js?

http://viz-js.com/


For flowcharts, check out code2flow.com. (I'm unaffiliated — just a fan!)


Every modern office application as they currently are, only they save to an easy to parse text file.

I'm talking about AutoCAD, Ms Office, etc.


A PDF spell checker for last-second resume sendoffs.


A NLP text interface basically for everything I interact with either on a computer or my mobile. I doubt I'll ever use a voice based tool like Siri or its' equivalents, but I'd really like to type in commands I'd like to issue rather than click around an UI.

It feels error prone and isn't always very accessible as I'm motorically a bit challenged although definitely not disabled.

I simply adore applications that let me invoke commands through text like the command palette in vscode or Sketch Runner in Sketch. This is also why I'm a heavy CLI user and spend a lot of time customising my aliases and work flows. I'd like to extend this outside of the terminal.


You can set Siri on a Mac to accept text and turn off voice responses, then trigger it with a keyboard shortcut. Works pretty well and much faster than the voice controls.


An enhanced Activity Monitor for MacOS. Basically annotate all the processes so I can click on them and see where they are from, what they do, and whether or not I can kill them. WTH is "Dock" for and why is using so much CPU?


Sloth [1] might be of interest to you.

[1] https://github.com/sveinbjornt/Sloth


I would buy this.


Me too.


Generator for answers to the question „What software/app do you wish would exist“


You will need a recursive name for it :-)


Damn you beat me to it xD


Oh, I got another one - Design your new kitchen and use AR to preview it.

Step 1: Measure your room by pointing the phone at the corners and triangulating the room. Can do iregularly shaped room. More pictures = more angles = floor plan through the power of trig.

Step 2: On your generated 2d floorplan place the kitchen units you want

Step 3: hold up your phone, point it at a corner again to triangulate location, generate 3D perspective view of the kitchen units / new floor / painted walls / lighting and put it ontop of the picture in the right place.

Make a rough prototype and then convince a major retailer to pay you to finish it without owning the IP.


A cross-platform note taking app, with the ability to jot down an idea and later associate resources with it (links, media, other notes, etc.).

Idea + resources = Project (like an article or a book), and tags can help allocate the same resource to multiple projects.

It should allow the note taking to be very quick and fast, like writing a message.

And yeah, I've been trying a bunch of apps over the years. Evernote, the closest one, doesn't fit yet.


Have you tried EMACS orgmode (https://orgmode.org)? With all the goodies, such as org-capture, linking features and so on you can get great solution basically for free in terms of money. On the other hand it is quite time consuming investment, but hey, note taking system is for life if it's good, right?

Although the interface is text-based (I believe it's a pro not con) it is therefore quite clunky in terms of media integration (photos are good, but I don't know about the videos) the rest (links, associating other resources, tagging system, todos system, exporting, projects etc) is quite superior to everything I've ever seen. Also it's FOSS and therefore extremely expendable IF you are willing to learn a bit of elisp (although I don't know it and I'm fine using just pieces of code from the internet and Spacemacs).


Ms Access in a modern form


Isn't this essentially Airtable?


Airtable is only a part of what access can do today. I'm still a fan of airtable for all of the connectivity it provides to other online tools.


1) That's far beyond the scope of a single person's side project

2) What isn't modern about Access? What do you want to change that isn't just removing features?


1) There was a startup a few years back similar to airtable that was acquhired. They had made sizeable inroads to covering the Access footprint. It probably should be a team effort like Airtable though.

It's hard to imagine one person replacing 20+ years of dev effort.

2) Excel and Access prove the need for software in a business and model out use cases.

If Access could render to the web, (similar to lotus notes to domino) that likely would be sufficient. Since most of the access backend is available, maybe that is feasible on some level.


> What isn't modern about Access?

Almost everything.

Access does not have granular security, fault tolerance, auditing, or a couple dozen other features that one would expect in a modern database.


I wouldn't argue if anyone said access wasn't designed to do those things. Microsoft always has the next solution you should move to.

I have seen Access app developers run their access app on top of a MS Sql server to bring that kind of functionality in, though.

Access was less of a database and more "let's work with our data using forms and reports".

It was powerful in the hands of people who understood the data and details they work with day in and day out and let them form solutions for themselves when there was no other way.

In many enterprises access is just there like excel, but custom software is not permitted.


> one would expect in a modern database.

Can’t resist I should thou, access is in my mind an embedded dB that added some features sits closer to SQLite than MySQL. Out of interest why do people choose to use access than SQL express is it the GUI driven development?


That's surprising, considering SQL Server is so advanced.

(My question was genuine, not rhetorical. I don't use Access and had no idea what state it's in.)


I would love if Python was built into Outlook and would let me write custom rules in Python to process mail.



What are some custom rules you would like to write in python ?


The options in Outlook are very limited.

Some that I encountered recently were:

You cannot use regular expressions.

There is not a way to create a rule to delete or move messages after a N days.


I wish there were something like Visual Basic for the development of web applications.


We built one!

https://anvil.works is the tool. It is quite explicitly based on VB and other systems like it: it's got a drag-and-drop UI designer, backed by Python. Double-click a button, and edit the Python code that runs when it's clicked. You write Python on the front end (we transpile to JS), Python on the back end, and we host it for you with a click. Check it out!


Nice solution, but there's no way I would touch it unless it's open source. Any plan for that?


This would be super useful, but only if it is able to design using best-practices and output simple and concise CSS.

The problem with many of these tools is that the output is so convoluted that it couldn't be edited manually.


I can't tell if you're joking... Microsoft had technology like this for years and years and no one used it. (I'm not talking about Frontpage.)


A Wireshark plugin that tells you process name/id instead of just address/port. This would only work for local server or clients, not remote ones.


An ToDo app which could save and sync with single text-like file. Yes, what I want is an cross platform, modern UI Emacs and `the` org-mode :)



Try note plan. https://noteplan.co/

I’m not associated but tried it and liked the features.


I would like a mobile app that allows me to drag-and-drop a task from my daily todo list onto my daily schedule.


Vim keybindings for file explorer(s).




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