At school we often had to draw class diagrams, basically boxes containing some text, with arrows pointing to other boxes. The free tool we were using for this was made with Java, and would often be very buggy and was generally hated. I couldn't really find anything I liked and ended up making the diagrams in Gimp, not fun. I was really pining for a small perhaps Flash-based web tool that would let me make diagrams and download as PDF.
Mayonnaise on fries is British. It's probably related but we'd have to market it differently.
(I've noted that the covers on the Harry Potter books in Britain seem to be drawn for intelligent people, whereas the books in the US are far more cartoony.)
Well now you only have a year under 102(b)... This counts as public disclosure.
Although, more seriously, I doubt it would be accepted. In order to be patented, the idea must be novel, useful, and not obvious. It meets the requirements for useful, but not-obvious and novel may be harder to establish. (Depending on any patents for single-serving condiment packaging, they may be phrased in general enough terms to be considered prior art)
That idea's been done, but if you could develop a packet of goo that could be used as both ketchup and sunscreen, then you'd have something. You could put half on your burger, and the other half on your face. Huge time saver.
I don't think you can patent this...my school gives these out at any outdoor event. My friends and I usually collect a bunch and I keep them around -- in my purse, in my car, etc.
A Pandora equivalent for pr0n. Enter/grade a few images you like or dislike, build a profile and "stations" to group similar kinds of content. Maybe these profiles could be condensed into some short-length string--say a Meyer-Briggs type of string (INTP, etc)--that you can then carry with you without having to actually give out personal info, but that says hey, according to this standard, these are my likes/dislikes when it comes to erotic imagery, now gimme the goods.
I've wondered myself about the market for allowing people to drill down through multiple fetishes. the vast majority of sites organize by single fetishes. what if you could input a bunch of fetishes and it would automatically find the videos that have the most tags in common with your search? this would work best with something that supported user tags, so people could find and tag specific elements.
A database of MAC addresses of stolen equipment. Participants install a client which listens for the MAC addresses of all computers in the local network, alerting the participant that the new possessor of a stolen MacBook Pro 15", 2006 edition, two deep scratches on the lid, seems to be nearby.
Of course, you'd have to find a way of guarding against malicious entries.
This idea would work really well if you implemented it in wireless access points since they are already listening for Probe Request packets from stations that aren't associated to their network.
This means that if anybody opens a stolen laptop in the vicinity of one of these APs it would be detected without requiring that the laptop be associated to the local network.
99.999% of people who steal hardware aren't smart enough to do this. Also, 99.9999999% of people who use stolen hardware have bought it (off eBay for instance) and won't scrub it, but will plug it in somewhere that's monitoring.
I think there's a big problem with this. Where it'd be useful is at large organizations, which generally create multiple subnets to structure their network. This would mean that you need to put this client in the router, or force the organization to have an always on box for each subnet with the client.
Some kind of GPS-based app for a mobile device that works out how you get to and from work and tries and puts you in touch with others who work closeby and the hours that you do for the sake of carpooling.
Hmm, didn't think I would have gotten as many upvotes as I did...
Anyway, I know this may seem like common sense, but if someone was going to build an app like this, I would suggest that the best platform for it is the iphone simply because Apple actively market their technology as more "green" than other manufacturers.
Hmmm, what about a carousel/mobile that sits above the crib. The mobile has a camera in it that takes daily pictures of the baby's face so that the parents can see their child's progression.
Maybe the mobile could upload the photos to an online album.
Ad exploder. An add-in for FF and IE that lets you "explode" ads by clicking on them, complete with sound effects and animation (or not). After you explode the ad, you'll never see any more material in that spot again.
I don't just want to not see ads, I want something with some visceral action, something to make the ads not want to come back! -- ie, something fun.
If you dropped the part about never seeing an ad there again, you could probably get display Ad companies to pay you for each explosion as a click, because if a user exploded it, then they saw the ad. Then, you'd LOVE ads!
Much of the point of advertising is to convince (or remind) those who are not already convinced (or aware). Advertising is not advertising if you are hitting people eager to see your message - that's marketing.
I've been thinking about turning the daily act of email spam deletion into a brain jogging game (like the one that is selling like crazy for Nintendo DS).
I've always wanted to see this in a Sphere-like way - I want to read HN's comments on random articles on BBC, for example, while I'm on BBC News. Or Read Reddit and Digg's comments in tabs beneath the original source article. I'd also like to be able to 'subscribe' to which communities' comments I'd be able to read.
I'm interested to hear why you think comments are evil.
Would there be any way to make that discussion-like structure accept input from anonymous, infrequent, or lazy users? Setting up a blog just to reply might leave out some decent responses.
They're second-class outlets. A blog author can say whatever they want; their posts are first-class elements in Google's corpus; the medium encourages stand-alone writing instead of meaningless squibs.
The original vision of the "blogosphere" rejected comments. "Write a blog post, instead." Here's an old, well-known example:
The problem right now is that the affordances favor comments over posts. The first step is to adjust them; it just so happens that by making a threaded blog-group reader, you're also providing a lot of value to people who don't care that comments are evil, but do find it hard to follow 10 different blogs talking about the same thing.
So, many cities have bus systems and those bus systems now-a-days are usually GPS equipped for several reasons (notably that a central office can monitor the system and that the busses can announce ADA-compliant stop messages based on location without the driver being involved).
I'd love to have something on my phone that would tell me where the next bus was on a cool Google Map (or other) and an estimated time to arrival (which could be calculated by Google Maps). Of course, you'd have to get your transit authority to give you access to their GPS results.
But this would probably be one of the most helpful things a transit authority could do. The problem most people have with public transit is that it can be inconvenient, but often it is convenient if you have better/more complete knowledge of it. For example, when I get up in the morning, I have no idea whether a bus went by a minute ago and it'll be another 20+ minutes waiting or whether a bus is 2 minutes away.
This could also help trip planning. Often in a mass transit system, there are multiple routes to get anywhere. The trip planners we have today are primitive in that they often don't take current information into account (such as speed at various times of day, location of the next bus/trolly/subway train in proximity, etc.). Using GPS information would greatly change that.
I thought that map is just interpolating from the schedules, not from GPS? Not that it makes much difference, the schedules in Finland being very accurate for buses afaik.
In Tampere on major stops we have information about when the next bus is coming in, some based on GPS and some on schedules, this distinction is indicated on the board.
If you trust your local transit authority's posted timetables, then you could gather GPS coordinates for bus stops and write an app that correlates the two with your current location and time.
That's the thing - unless you're in Japan, you can't rely on timetables. Otherwise this idea wouldn't make much sense (it would still be cool to amaze your friends with it while waiting for the bus though ;)).
i think my dog would like a game that required her to quickly decide whether a particular newly introduced item requires growling, barking, or wagging. is it the trash truck, the hated dogs next door, or mommy? the dog often gets this wrong, so practice would be good.
Custom video games (for non geeks). I doctored up a basic shooter game for my girlfriends birthday, replacing the backgrounds + all the characters with relevant images from her life. It makes a basic shooter game much more interesting when someone you know is attacking!
Hm, I pondered doing this for my memory game (pairs). You think there would be much interest for this? I could even automate it to create memory games from flickr.
a bugmenot type service...except it would act as a proxy. The proxy will be used to hide the actual login info, and to prevent the users from screwing around with the actual account.(basically I see this as changing the username to XXXX, not letting users go to pages like usercp.php etc).
Right now bugmenot is pretty much useless, since all accounts are dead almost right away.
This way the passwords etc will remain private, and the accounts won't go dead right away
I assume the accounts go dead mostly because the content providers kill them, not because individual users kill them. There isn't much you can do to stop a content provider from figuring out which accounts are bugmenot accounts and killing them... It's an arms race to see who will give up first.
more reason to keep the login info secret. Sure they can figure out the account by multiple ips...but that takes a little bit more effort.
Honestly, I think the user side portion is a bigger problem. Its all the psychology, people change the login info so that noone else would be able to do the same thing and prevent their access.
In addition to Jerf's comment, I will also point out that you can't hide the login info from the content providers. All they have to do is steganographically encode the user name into the web page content. Then they can use your bugmenot-like service to retrieve the page, extract the user name, and cancel the account.
I still see no benefit to the users changing the account info. This is to access sites with free accounts, yes? In that case, isn't it actually just as much work to assert control over multiple bugmenot accounts as it is to sign up for the free accounts in the first place?
You can not hide login info from the people you are logging into. All they have to do is install your plugin and start logging in. Whatever clever algorithm you put in place to expire canceled accounts works in their favor too. Less than a day's worth of scripting and I can fully automate this within Firefox.
I'll say it again: Whatever counter claim you think you have, you can not hide login info from the people you are logging into.
A first-aid application for e.g. iPhone which shouts at me what to do when finding an unconscious person. With clear voice and pictures that I can even understand if my head's in "omg omg he's dying what to do what to do" mode.
(Perhaps such an app exists; I'm too far away from an iTunes-capable computer right now to check.)
That's a pretty cool idea, but aren't you better off calling 911 or your local equivalent? What about liability issues? What about responsiveness? This thing needs to be fast and non-intrusive !
I was in a (non-life-threatening) accident last week and I can think of a couple of useful first-aid pointers lots of people overlook, like:
* so what is the local emergency number? (based on GPS position)
* "let's give him something to drink to comfort him ..." (Don't !)
Basically a decision tree to help people with basic first aid. These protocols exist in the first aid world.
This could be useful in the case of a mass emergency where 911 can't respond to everyone in a timely way. Also, when you don't have a cell signal. Or after the zombie apocalypse.
When you take a first aid course they often give you cards with these kinds of instructions to carry with you so I don't think there would be a problem liability-wise with the app itself.
This is similar to an idea I proposed for a non-literate UI for a developing world mobile app. If there is no doctor in the village they can get quick first-aid tips, organize transport, and a remote doctor can try to assess the problem with pictures.
Google e-IMCI to see some actual research in this area, maybe you'll be inspired, though that is focused on more formal procedures for nurses (like detecting what's wrong with a sick child).
fwiw, perfectlygoodideas.com is available right now. perhaps someone could use the uclassify api to classify & cluster similar ideas & recommend partnerships. no idea how well it would work, but it might be worth a an hour or two on a weekend to find out. im just thinking out loud here :)
ive pared down my list of "want to dos" to a single choice, but i definitely want to use uclassify. if i hadn't buckled down, i'd have a half-working django prototype in ~/src/ right now that i'd revisit to burn some time on every 3 months.
There's something already out there similar to this, at ShouldExist.org (currently down for redesign.) Might be some duplication of effort, or an opportunity to strike while the iron is hot -- depending on your point of view.
That's a perfectly good application of a reputational economy. There's pretty much infinite possibility. I'm not sure if it has been explored in fiction better than Doctorow's Down and Out Magic Kingdom, about a post-scarcity, post-singularity society with a reputational economy. http://craphound.com/down/ Available free online under a CC license.
gnus email/news-reader already provides, such a fature via scoring. You can score somebody up/down. At a configured threshold, you dont get to see the posts/articles from such folks anymore. love to have something like this in gmail.
This is smart but I'm not sure what the fundamental transaction on such a market is. Keep in mind that there is no rivalry for karma (in an economic sense) and that people always keep their karma after giving to others (or possibly even increase it).
Not sure I agree; I think people are already using ad hoc methods to "price" karma; for instance, I have used such methods to "price" a Hacker News karma point as 1,000,000 reddit points.
The side effect of the market would be to rank discussion systems by credibility, or signal/noise, in real time.
It's also geeky enough that I think you could keep liquidity, even though there's no dollar value to karma.
I have been coding a prototype of this in my free time over the past couple of weeks. It's fun, but I'm not sure it actually makes lots of sense.
Not only is it really hard come up with a model to convert currency from many places into a "standardized" format (or even to allow for OpenID-style distribution) - it'll also not be easy to provide data to other sites that allows them to do useful things easily. Tags might be as good as it gets.
One other thing Y-people might not like: this SHOULD NOT have a revenue model, I think. Freemium completely screws you and ads on a reputation site would just feel wrong. Besides, it's a platform.
That's why I keep thinking about open-sourcing what I have, especially in order to try to solve the distribution problem before an alpha site might go online. Being a hopeless idealist I really want to see a service-decoupled reputation service that is NOT facebook/google FC.
Please let me know if any of you'd be interested to join me in playing around with this.
I just don't see how it is technically feasible, as most sites don't provide a way to transfer karma? Or is the idea more that of an independent karma service that other sites could plug in to (like gravatar does for profile pictures)?
People in other industries solve this sort of thing already. It sounds like some sort of drug would help accomplish this, but I have concerns about the health repercussions.
A botnet that 100% autonomously opens a bunch of honeypot email accounts, publishes them somewhere, reads every single spam message and organizes DOS-attacks on pharmacy sites that pay for spam advertising.
For toll roads, some sort of in car item that will receive a short audio ad and play it. Thus using the ad money to pay my toll. I realize there are several issues immediately off the top of it, but it could be a viable alternative to having to pay tolls.
That is an interesting idea, however certain tolls (e.g. london city) have not the goal to earn money, but to keep people away. playing ads won't keep them away.
Filter or customize your tv ads. I hate it when a horror movie ad comes on and I have to scramble to change the channel. Similarly, I may like watching John&Kate+8, but that doesn't mean I want to watch the typically associated feminine hygiene commercials.
How about at least filtering the online ads. Just put a little link in the corner of the ad that allows you to say "no thanks, I never want to see this ad again."
Also, how about not having to see the same ad three times during a given show? At this point maybe we're getting too close to tivo for the advertisers to feel comfortable.
Site that let's teenagers list what kinds of odd jobs they would do for money, like lawn mowing, leaf raking, garage cleaning. Then people in their neighborhood can look for kids to do this work.
You would set a means of money exchange and the kids could publish what they are earning money for to draw the adults into picking them.
Here's one I spent a month researching last year and couldn't find a partner -- a virtual commodities exchange. An online commodities market for WoW gold, HotOrNot flowers, anything else that only exists in virtual reality.
This would be complete with futures trading and derivatives.
(Lots of other details required to make it work. Email me if you'd like to hear more)
All of these languages have a powerful reflection/meta programming facility (yes, Perl included). So technically, something like could be implemented:
1) The server (using Twisted in Python or POE in Perl) listens for requests. Requests are for objects.
2) The server looks at the request, serializes it into a s-exp describing the state of the object sent to it.
3) Emacs then looks at the s-exp and decides what to do with the object initially looked at (suggest a method to complete/use on? highlights it red if it's wrong? bring up HTML formated documentation, etc...)
You might want to look into ropemacs (and pymacs which it uses) for some slimeish stuff with python in Emacs. I way to go from there to slime but it's a start.
I'm not entirely sure, but I think you might just have to implement a Swank server, and SLIME* would work without problems. It could be that you're forced to use s-expressions, but I doubt it.
I haven't looked at the client portion of SLIME in a while, but wouldn't there be some changes needed to deal with languages where statements and expression are different from each other?
Getting Perl code into an s-exp would be fairly difficult actually (as opposed to getting an s-exp from a Perl complex hash -- which would be really easily) - generally (with Perl5) the consensus is anything that can parse Perl, is Perl. Python, Ruby and Perl6 (which effectively is a Lisp, complete with macros in forms of first-order primitives for CFGs) would, I am sure, be easier a lot easier.
> I haven't looked at the client portion of SLIME in a while, but wouldn't there be some changes needed to deal with languages where statements and expression are different from each other?
A 1-on-1 clone of GMail, but installable on any webserver. I love the GMail interface but I hate to have my mail on their servers for obvious reasons. Same goes for Reader, Calendar and Docs.
A Taxi service site and iPhone app. Lets you send your current location to the cab company with your iPhone and then track the cab as it arrives. Maybe even offer a prepay option so you can pay with your paypal account and just read off a confirmation number to the cab driver or something at the end of the trip for them to bill you with. Maybe in order to prevent confusion over more than one cab being called from the same location the app can light your phone screen up in a unique color for you to call the cab with as it approaches.
This wouldn't really be necessary in NYC where cabs are ubiquitous but in DC it would be useful.
Relevant point, but money was created to abstract before we had general-purpose abstracting machines like computers with their associated tools. If it wouldn't get you in trouble with the IRS (big "if"), I think it'd be fascinating to see the new tool applied to the old problem. It might create an entirely new kind of market.
Bartering doesn't get you in trouble with the IRS, as long as any income you earn from it (be that a cow, an hour-long massage, or sixteen clay beads) gets declared on your tax return at "fair market value". And then, obviously, you pay income tax on it. The IRS will accept just about anything to satisfy your tax obligations, as long as "anything" is US dollars.
The Internet has provided a medium for new growth in the bartering exchange industry. This growth prompts the following reminder: Barter exchanges are required to file Form 1099-B for all transactions unless certain exceptions are met.
No, Graphviz is truly free--it's open source, under the Common Public License Version 1.0.
And, since no one has described it here yet: aside from making pretty-pictures, the really neat thing about Graphviz is that it is declarative--you describe the nodes in your graph (which can include text, shape, color, etc.), specify the connections and voila--Graphviz does the rest.
Oh, and you can use it programatically too--there are libraries for many languages, so you could, e.g., have a user submit genealogy data and then spit back a pretty family-tree diagram.
The main inconvenience I have with my shopping list on paper is that the things I forget to buy are not automatically on next week's shopping list. And I might forget less things if I could easily delete the items I buy while I'm in the supermarket. This sounds like a small easy-to-write application.
The application should also have the advantages of my paper shopping list. My wife should be able to add things to the list using her phone. Adding items to the list should be extremely easy. I hate writing text messages.
That said, I think there's an android app I saw recently on the market that does this. I'll install it later and see how closely it compares to the features mentioned.
After an initial download, and about 10 minutes worth of testing, I have concluded that the Android Market "Shopping List" app sucks. It's a decent first attempt at a shopping list app, but it has (basically) two features -- add items to the list, and check items as done. The checking of items as done doesn't throw them to the bottom of the list or do anything other than put a check next to them.
It's an idea for an application I would like to have, not for a startup.
However, I wouldn't be surprised if there is money to be made with an application that helps users their spend money. You could try to sell it to a phone company, or a supermarket. You could let supermarkets advertise discounted products. You could make people pay for the application, or for 100 updates to the list. If users update the list per sms, maybe you can share the revenue with the phone company.
I suppose the biggest problem is not the monetization but the distribution. This is solved for the iphone, and for android phones, but for other phones it looks like a nightmare.
Another problem is to make easy enough to use that it actually makes life more simple. I find typing on a phone cumbersome. Maybe using a dictionary of the items you have bought previously would make it easy enough. It could be nice to be able to take a picture of a product's barcode to add the item in the list. On the other hand every added functionality diminishes the ease of use.
Rescue-Time for Intranets (stand alone would do too).
Ideally it would be able to track not only what applications you are using or URL are looking at, but also which files you are working with. Then you can tag entire directories in order to keep track of projects.
Pretty reports is a must
Bonus points if you provide programmatic hooks to automate filling of damned time tracking, ticket trackig and TPS tracking 3rd party solutions.
I've always thought about a system for teaching kids about programming by building AI players for online games. The system would consist of 3 components:
1. A screen scraping/computer vision toolkit that would supply most of the AI primitives to interpret games
2. An interpreter for each game that would provide an machine usable API to interact with the game
3. An AI program that would then play the game
Component 1 would only need to be built once, Component 2 would need to be built once per game and then Component 3 is what the kids would get to build.
I always thought this would be an excellent, gentle introduction into the world of programming.
Take Fishy (http://www.xgenstudios.com/game.php?keyword=fishy) for example. It would be really simple to build a dumb AI that could do ok but to build a really great AI would involve some really sophisticated path planning and optimization algorithms.
What better way to get kids inspired and wanting to learn about programming than have them solve the games they're already playing?
a reverse of friendfeed.com that pushes updates to all of your services.
if someone changes their avatar picture, email address, name (marriage), location, etc., they should be able to do it on one site and have it pushed to all of the other sites that user is a member of.
authentication would be a big problem, but you're smart, figure it out.
Nappies (diapers) for babies that have a little pocket with a couple of wipes in it. Basically I want to be able to stuff a couple of nappies in by jacket pocket or bag and then when the baby needs changing I've got a fresh nappy and a couple of wipes.
Global Tabbing - I have a lot of windows open (as do you all i'm sure) and i'd really to be able to bundle them into one tabbed window in a Firefox stylee.
Look at something like Coda (www.panic.com) and think instead of having all the apps built in to the app you just have a tabbed window container that you add app windows to that allows you to quickly switch from one to the other (eg. tabs for text editor,terminal,version control gui,ftp client, pdf viewer)
Yeah fluxbox is nice. I use (eight) virtual desktops to group things by what I'm doing logically. And then within each desktop tab things together when it works -- and automatically if it is the same program (very helpful for terminals etc.).
Though tech could be white labeled for any topic - beyond theme of domain above (GPS locate hiking buddies in central park, people who like your favorite movie, tons of stuff... interesting new way to meet people).
Something that produces iPhone code out of Flex/Flash code and vice-versa? That sounds impossible (I don't know either one) but if it were, it could be cash cow, no?
There's a library called CoreAnimation that's similar in some ways to Flash, supporting keyframes and tweening and such. The iPhone also has (an unofficial) port of Rhino, to run the needed ActionScript. (Compiling that to native code would be a whole 'nother matter.)
This is actually something I've considered working on. And no, it's not impossible!
It could be implemented as a flash llvm front-end with an objective C emitter. You'd also need to write a Flash VM in objective C, which I haven't looked seriously at but wouldn't be trivial.
Most importantly, a system like this would allow you write any application UI in Flash. A C developer, say, could then leverage Adobe's interface builders and the flex library without the need for disgusting hacks.
A magnifying glass with bluetooth to project the images on your pc, with a shutter to take snapshots of what you're looking at, with different zoom levels and as powerful as a microscope.
Imagine the kids running around the house taking shots of worms, spiders, ants, etc. and sharing them online.
I know, but I mean something more portable.
You can't take the microscope around looking for stuff.
Bring the lens to the bug, not the bug to the lens.
A twitter-like feed that sends text messages to cell phones that let first responders like police and ambulance folks recruit helpful bystanders to assist in managing emergencies.
For instance - I need an entrance ramp blocked so no more cars get on this highway - is there someone nearby who can park their car to block it and wave people around?
Or - how many people are stranded on the other side of this flooded road - can someone nearby give me an estimate?
There should be some well-known way to subscribe to the feed, and it should be able to recognize your physical location.
A visual dictionary/wiki for finding the names of obscure things. Users could submit definitions and pictures. They could also tag pictures with the names of related things so you could search based on objects that are commonly found near or work with the thing you're looking for. The picture would help you confirm you found the right thing.
For example, suppose you didn't know what the little plastic thing on the end of your shoelace was called and you wanted to buy more of them. You could search for "shoelace" or "end of shoelace" and find a picture of an aglet. Maybe even some ads to where you could buy a supply of aglets. Now, no more frayed shoelace ends for you, and life is a little better. :)
Visual dictionaries (including online ones) already exist, although according to one ( http://visual.merriam-webster.com/ ), the aglet is actually called a "tag".
I have a hand scanner for barcodes that works fine with Amazon.com. It looks like a keyboard to my PC and so when I scan a barcode it simply 'types' the ISBN into the appropriate box on Amazon.
Ha. We were required to use Poseidon for UML, but it was such a pain and crashed so often that we ended up making all our UML Diagrams in Dia (which is a nice enough and lightweight program, if slightly clunky; you might want to check it out). Yet instead of being pleased or even just ambivalent about the entire enterprise, our teacher got mad that we used a tool other than the prescribed one. I never really understood why people would get pissy about what tools you used instead of focusing on the actual output.
Maybe your teacher's goal was to encourage people in the class to learn Poseidon so he could hire them on a private project. Or maybe he/she was looking for a genius who would be able to figure out how to code Poseidon in such a way that it would not crash.
There are lots of other reasons why a teacher might set specific rules for an exercise such as this, too. Unfortunately you chose to ignore the instructions -- and you made the mistake of second-guessing him/her -- assuming that the teacher's goal was the end result and not the process of getting there.
A device that twitpics from my dog's collar every X minutes. I'd like to take a glance at what my dog's day is filled with. He seems very busy. This may be more fun with a cat though. Especially one that goes outside (though you'd need an EVDO connection, probably).
I've thought of this too, but I can't get around my "moral" (not really, but that's the best description) qualms about this. We already self-select news to reinforce our bias. This idea would just reinforce the bias. Still I'm thinking about doing it. With the caveat that I would occasionally put in a "opposite opinion" article or piece of news.
Free Cell phone usage and phone. Must use Advertisers ringtones and ringback tones or jingles. Same for text messages. Add embedded java advertising in background.
ff plugin/addon that saves the state of my browsing session online, so that i don't lose my open tabs when i move from one computer to another. it probably won't work for sites which require login but i don't mind.
Just a thought, have you tried www.dabbleboard.com? It might be what you're looking for to do your diagraming.
Otherwise, Viso has a steeper learning curve, but probably has more tools for what you're doing. I know it's expensive to buy, but with a Bizspark membership (get sponsored and only pay $100 after 3 years) it's free for the downloading along with your MSDN membership.
Might it be easier to just build a dedicated sort of line for each room? Like a part of the wall that opens up and is connected to the kitchen/wherever, to deliver your food. Would be harder at first but it'd be much easier down the line, and more efficient.
I actually worked in a hospital where they paid for robots to deliver medical records to doctors/nurses. The nurse would request records, and then the medical records department would fill it up and send them out. I think that didnt last too long, not efficient enough.
hotels rent space. your suggestion limits space. do you think that the advantage of robot server compared to humans would offset the huge decrease in available space to rent?
A big problem I have is I want to post a single question to a forum and be on my way. I hate having to sign up. Same deal but worse with mailing lists. What if your app had login accounts to the top say 10,000 forums so people could pop in and post questions some how?
Some forum software accepts openID now. I agree completely, at this point I have so many forum accounts on random sites where I just needed to ask one question pertaining to some program or something. The other day I needed to ask a question on some forum and was about to make a new account when I found that I already had made an account. Now I've decided to only use openID for new forums if possible and just not join others unless I think I'll participate a lot.
Kind of like a mint.com of internet activities? I like the idea. I'm not sure how easy it would be to be exhaustive. I can see how you could add the regular places you hang out at. Casual comments would be harder to track but a bookmarklet could help there.
But isn't that kind of like a YC startup? I forgot the name though but I remember the website being a place where you could follow people's comments on blogs.
Is your idea focused on forums?
a simple iphone book/html reader that downloads my latest bookmarks on delicious tagged 'read' so I could read them offline.
This way I don't have to sync and stuff ;) does instapaper already do this? I tried it once before.. I forgot the reason why I got back to ruBooks and a custom python script to download websites from my delicious feed.
Sometimes I've had the idea of making a sort of "fan page" for my university (Tampere University), because their own homepage is so horrible. On the surface it looks OK, but actually it is quite difficult to use in actually planning which classes to take. The fan page would be maintained by students who are actually taking those classes, combined with pressuring the teachers to take part. This is where I think it wouldn't really work, people couldn't be arsed to help, so I haven't attempted it.
I feel so embarrassed for our faculty. I mean they have classes on UI design and usability, yet it's beyond them to make their own pages usable. This is the home page of our logic programming class: http://www.cs.uta.fi/~tn/LOGO_kotisivu_2009.htm I wouldn't mind the yellow background and the all-caps text, if every other course would just have the same information in the same place in the same format so that some sort of study planning could be done.
I'm surprised no one has tried to sell your school a system like Blackboard. Is penetration of such systems low outside of the USA? Sounds like there is quite a marketing opportunity there, if you were to develop a competitor to Blackboard. Their software isn't great, it wouldn't be hard to do better, though integrating with the university's existing IT infrastructure could be tricky.
Be warned though, Blackboard basically has their whole system patented, though I think their patent for "using a CMS for school" was recently overturned. The patents may be less important outside of the USA.
If anyone wants to make a competitor to Blackboard, please do. My school uses it and it is terrible: the UI is awful, response time is slow, and professors across the board hate it and prefer to use their own websites to upload files. Shouldn't be too hard to make a better version.
Well I posted about this here, because I have no intention of doing this. I don't really want to work with an entity whose income isn't really determined by the satisfaction of their customers. Finnish universities are supported by the government, there are no tuition fees. The system is nice for us students, but perhaps leads to them not really caring very much if their homepages are hard to use.
A way to replicate data over the copious amounts of spare disk space in a roomfull of standard office computers, including implicit duplication such that some machines being off or broken doesn't matter.
I saw a link here a while ago about encoding redundant copies of data with less duplication than you'd think...
A remote control program like FogCreek Copilot designed for OMG-SLOW connections.
I want to be able to disable screen updates except for manually triggered refreshes of certain areas, or to block out areas I don't want to refresh until instructed otherwise. I want extremely low bandwidth low detail options that fill in like progressive JPG instead of line-by-line from the top. I want to be able to cancel data transfer and reset to nothing. I want the remote client to screen-scrape and send compressed text and outlines of windows and to be able to send it high level Windows support instructions like "open the control panel" and have it not refresh the screen until that's done.
I can orient myself in a Windows desktop with a small amount of information, but I can't stand hideously slow remote control connections.
Service compare engine
Service check - a cost comparison engine for various services with a mobile front end - average cost in your area. So when the mechanic says - it'll be $2000 for the break job - you know how many hours it should take and how much it should be
That's a good idea, and one I've actually kind of piddled around with, however, I have the nagging feeling that it isn't the costs themselves that are egregious, but the diagnosis.
Example: I take my car in for a squealing noise it makes. Obviously, I'm not going to pay $3000 for a belt replacement, but I have no assurance that the "Miscalibrated Magnetostat" isn't the correct diagnosis. I'm willing to pay $3000 for a magnetostat recalibration, and the going rate may well be $3k, but all the mechanic really does is replace a belt.
Though, saying it out loud, perhaps I should just implement some kind of rating system for mechanics as well.
How about a proxy server I can use to block or partially block sites for myself? (Procrastination preventer) Since I'm not administering a corporate WAN, this should be lightweight and simple to use. It should let me set everything with a GUI. It should present the top 10 sites I visit as a list and let me block each with a click. The parital block feature can limit my use to 15 minute blocks or something like that.
I've been thinking about this one for a while, with half an eye to coding it up:
Mousehole or some other lightweight proxy with a list of sites. When you go to one of those sites, it redirects you to your "to-do" list; google notebook or rememberTheMilk or something with similar capabilities. There's a button to continue to your intended site, but you've got the reminders right there of what you really intended to do instead of spending time on a site you have marked as a time waster.
Could have priority markings and due dates integrated if it were a customized task list instead of google or RTM, and pop up the interstitial less often or less obtrusively when there's no important deadlines approaching, etc.
A location aware twitter app, which will filter tweets based on where I am right now. It can figure out the location relevance of a tweet by scanning its content or by its origin(if the senders are using your client which will geo tag it?). In short, if I am in SFO, I want to hear only about tweets relevant to SFO.
I want to do this one day, but have no plans of doing it any time soon: a playlist generator for different sized mp3 players. An app I install locally that will scan my music library and then I select a song and the app mashes up with last.fm and generates a playlist of the best similar songs that I currently have that is a maximum total size in MB so all I have to do is put that playlist into whatever I transfer my music to mp3 player with and everythings done. Easy way to fill up my mp3 player with fresh music every day.
I've always wondered why social networks don't ally with music labels and promote/sell music. Small networks can contact indie labels, and huge networks can work with sony, etc ...
It just seems to me that music is the perfect social product...
Yeah but I think it has taken them a long time to realize. What I am getting at is a music advertising/sales marketplace where "any" social network could sign up and promote/sell music. This would be another possible solution to monetizing social networks. So if I maintained a 100k high school football network, There would be an easy way to integrate music ads. And when I say music I mean new acts in general, tours, specific shows, and of course actual product releases/merch sales. As I said, music is very social and everyone likes some kind of music.
