Ask HN What Web App Would You Like to See/Need?

[bbommarito]

I have this hankering to get started on a web app (Not really for YCombinator, but more because I have the time and really want to spend a chunk of time coding).

My problem is I have yet to find a web app that's lacking for my own needs. Tons of news sites, tons of tech sites for questions. This brings up a problem with trying to find a project to dig into.

So, what web app do you want to see happen? What niche, or need do you have that is not currently solved? The bigger the better, and the more interactive the better (I really miss doing heavy JS, so the more interaction needed, the better). Finance is not really my area of expertise, but anything outside that I can consider and think if it's feasible.

[Cafesolo]

I want an app that will send me an email when a band I like releases a new album. Maybe take my favorite artists from my Last.fm profile, and make money by referring album sales to Amazon.

[korussian]

I'm studying Korean. Learning Korean (or other Asian) words is hard because they usually don't sound anything like the words in other languages I know, making it tougher to create mnemonics for remembering them.

I want to build a super-simple webapp that works like a mad-lib, preferably based on excerpts from Hitchhiker's Guide, in order to hang vocab on memory hooks, using the Greek mnemonic method. User enters a bunch of nouns/verbs/adjectives/adverbs to remember, and the app replaces them into the excerpt. User reads the passage a bunch of times, and the weirdness of the words in the passage helps to give the words some context when remembering them. [Example below]

I'm not a developer, but I built this thing in vb.net reasonably okay. It's really meant to be a webapp though, and I'll bet a lot of language learners would use it.

Wanna design/build it together?

Example

  This 은행 has — or rather had — a problem, which was this: most of the 고양이 living on it were 날씬 for pretty much all of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of 큰 pieces of 숙제, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the 큰 pieces of 숙제 that were 날씬.

[bradleyjoyce]

I really really really want an app that will sync time tracking against tickets in GoPlan (http://goplannapp.com) with FreshBooks... that is, I something where I can send time entries in GoPlan to FreshBooks and then generate an invoice.

I even started writing a ruby wrapper for the GoPlan API, but have gotten sidetracked by other stuff :-(

[sahillavingia]

The one I'm making right now [1]! (This is probably the answer in everyone's minds.)

[1] Crate for file-sharing - http://letscrate.com/

[bbommarito → sahillavingia]

I figured most here are actually building something, but hey worth a shot asking.

The main reason this thought came up is being out of work (You don't hire a Ruby guy and then say "Hey, make this PHP script, Magento, go fast on two servers so it can handle 1000 concurrent requests") I have nothing really exciting to do. Figured I could kill days while looking for a gig with screen fulls of pretty colored code.

[adrianwaj]

Crowd sourcing open source projects: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1534517

[bbommarito → adrianwaj]

This actually interests me, since it's hard to find open source projects you might want to be involved in.

So, what would you ultimately like to see? A reddit type interface to talk about open source projects, with perhaps ties into Git/Github etc?

[adrianwaj → bbommarito]

There'd be a few things to think about: should the project already exist? If it exists, does the preexisting admin need to be involved with this crowd-source site? If it doesn't exist, should the submitter be the admin of the new project? Should submitters get their reputation from activity already performed on other sites?

Maybe a pledge system, where the submitter and pledgers agree to begin once a certain number of people pledge, and those pledges should be recorded to see if they're followed through. The site should aim to take a project from idea to completion. The submitter could set a number of roles that developers can choose to fulfill.

Even some crowd-sourced funding could work. Funding could be introduced or opened at some point, say from the beginning, but with activity picking up as a project progresses. Imagine Diaspora using the site.

[bbommarito → adrianwaj]

Hrmmm, yes very interesting.

I am picturing an almost Reddit like interface on the front end with lists of open source projects looking for help, os projects that are needed, and os projects that are being abandoned and need people to take over.

I could then add on pledge systems, etc.

[adrianwaj → bbommarito]

Yep. GitHub has an API so that could be useful. I'm sure people will want to discuss projects and ask questions, especially with the admin or creator.

Also, I was thinking that a widget would be good, so existing sites could let its users know it's looking for development help. These sites would build up a record of people that have contributed code.

[bbommarito → adrianwaj]

I think I will be working on this then.

It is certainly something I could use as well. It's so hard to figure out what to write OS-wise (That's the number one question during interviews: Have you ever contributed to open source, and I always say I don't know what to do or haven't found one to work with).

I have to figure out a name, but for now I will start doing some development, and mockups and see what I can come up with.

[adrianwaj → adrianwaj]

Cool.

bbommarito - I had the idea that you might want to work on one of my sites for a convertible note or straight equity. Ping me if interested (or anyone else) - at least you'd be standing on something already there. It hasn't launched but once it does, it really needs another piece to give it something that could gain decent traction. It uses Django.

I can also help with this idea too if you like (inc. mockups) - an idea which really comes about from this situation I find myself. For a domain, you could use hackerbrain .com which I can give.

[bbommarito → adrianwaj]

Hrmmm, Django huh? Been awhile since I worked with Django (I typically roll with Rails but have worked with Django).

What's the app? Kind of curious now.

[adrianwaj → adrianwaj]

bbommarito - concerns Live Touring (in Pinax). Send me an email and you can see the staging deployment.

[bbommarito → adrianwaj]

Now, when you say "discuss projects and ask questions" are you thinking wiki interface for discussions, maybe a sort of GetSatisfaction type idea for discussions, maybe with voting?

Even Github lacks some neat discussion systems that might be nice to see somewhere.

[adrianwaj → bbommarito]

Any of the above.

Provide a realtime chat if you can, ie like: https://github.com/isaacsu/twich Give it a timetable so each project has a set time for participants to chat, (the project in question is displayed at the top of a page.) You can also record chats, and offer multiple rooms.

Maybe a Q&A archive for each project, along the lines of http://forum.twich.me/ or http://formspring.me

[noodle]

go for the gold - better online dating. its sink or swim, and most sink, but if you swim, you'll be swimming in piles of money like scrooge mcduck.

[bbommarito → noodle]

It's funny, but I have thought about going the dating site route.

Looking at the state of gay oriented dating sites, they all pretty much cater to one-night hookups and there are folks in the LGBT community that aren't into that and instead want to make a relationship of it.

I have been playing with the idea of building that type of site. Not only will it fill a need I see, but I could play with web telephony and stuff like that.