

Ask HN: Any service you wish you had? - jfaucett

I'm looking for inspiration for a side project, mainly in the area of developer tools / services for making the devs life easier. Is there anything out there you wish you had to make your life easier?<p>For example right now, I'm thinking about a device directory with api where you can keep up-to-date on mobile/desktop/console/ereader devices and use the DB in your apps. Also a CSS parser to remove redundancies in a large code base.<p>Any ideas would be appreciated :)
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jiggy2011
A really good mysql gui client that runs on Linux and Windows. Doesn't need to
have loads of features, just make common things like browsing data sets,
creating new tables, deleting data etc very quick.

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jfaucett
up vote :), theres definately a need for this. The only "good" sql gui out
there in my opinion is sequel pro that only runs on mac. Mysql workbench
crashes on remote connections on linux and is a sluggish beast, it just gets
worse from there phpmyadmin...

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jiggy2011
SQLyog is better (though not free) and will run on Linux using Wine. But Wine
makes it ugly and clunky and crash prone.

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rbalicki
A service that takes care of parking tickets, speeding tickets, etc. for me. I
miss way too many deadlines.

And if you're dreaming big, please take care of my car registration, smog
check, registering me to vote when I move, etc.

Oh, sorry, this was supposed to be for dev tools. Just noticed. Well, anyway.

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zachlatta
I wish there was something akin to Homebrew for Windows package management.

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tarr11
I wish that Ruby on Rails worked on Windows.

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jfaucett
This is interesting. Rails does "work" on windows but the problem is that an
extensive amount of gems do not. So for any large/mid-sized project that
depends on a lot of other gems like rmagick, postgreSQL, solr, etc, you can
basically forget getting it to work under windows, which is really annoying
when your trying to test your app on old IE browsers, it would be nice to be
able pull your project on windows and directly edit the source and view log
files while testing in IE without the hassle of VM's etc.

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jiggy2011
<http://www.vagrantup.com/>

Edit: Yes it is technically a VM, but it is the lowest friction solution I
have found and you can configure it in such a way as to make the VM fairly
transparent.

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jfaucett
This looks interesting I will definately try it out. But could you explain how
this is better / easier than setting up a virtualbox with windows + IE ?

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jiggy2011
Easiest to just play with it , work through examples and see for yourself.

It actually uses virtualbox under the hood (though you can make it work with
other virtualisation software)

It is much quicker to get a VM up and running since you don't have to run
through the installation process of the distro.

You just look online for "rails dev box, vagrant" and run the command to
download and set it up.

It creates a shared folder between host and guest automatically, and port
forwarding is very easy to configure in such a way that localhost:8000 can map
to guest:80 or whatever.

SSH is super easy, just do "vagrant ssh" to get a shell, no key or password
settings required.

Also integrates with puppet etc and low memory footprint since you just get
what you need and not X etc.

But it's really the ease and speed of creating VMs that is the killer app for
me. So when I start a new project I can just type a few commands and have a
fresh VM for that project.

