
Ask HN: What software/app do you wish would exist? - aecorredor
Looking for some ideas about some stuff that might already kind of exist, but could be improved on in terms of features&#x2F;UX. Also, it could be something completely new.
======
shubb
Something like
[https://anichart.net/Fall-2019](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.

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

------
Felk
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.

~~~
netman21
delta-force.net does this I believe. Not free though!

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

~~~
chrisfrantz
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.

------
gesman
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.

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

[https://github.com/sharkdp/fd](https://github.com/sharkdp/fd)

------
aeternum
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.

~~~
wsgolfer
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/](http://plantuml.com/)

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

------
fartcannon
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.

------
person_of_color
A PDF spell checker for last-second resume sendoffs.

------
httpsterio
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.

~~~
chrisfrantz
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.

------
netman21
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?

~~~
chrisfrantz
I would buy this.

~~~
netman21
Me too.

------
wan888888
Generator for answers to the question „What software/app do you wish would
exist“

~~~
yitchelle
You will need a recursive name for it :-)

------
shubb
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.

------
digital_voodoo
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.

~~~
tikej
Have you tried EMACS orgmode ([https://orgmode.org](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).

------
j45
Ms Access in a modern form

~~~
smt88
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?

~~~
naikrovek
> 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.

~~~
j45
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.

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

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

~~~
tmaly
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.

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

~~~
meredydd
We built one!

[https://anvil.works](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!

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

------
cocoa19
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.

------
m4xw3llx
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 :)

~~~
ademcan
What about Notable?
[https://github.com/notable/notable](https://github.com/notable/notable)

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

------
cocoa19
Vim keybindings for file explorer(s).

