Hello all, let’s share a list of ideas participants can use to build their apps. Plug: had written a post on this last year: https://medium.com/@rushabh_mehta/project-ideas-for-mumbai-hackathon-2019-22d17465f294
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Transferring files between devices still sucks. It’s even more frustrating in a work environment where you’ve got your peers sitting on your left and right, and yet, to send a file to their system, you’ve got to go through weird hoops.
It’d be great to have a super simple GUI where you can configure your peers on your local network (even co-ordinates on the screen, for instance, left=peer A, right=peer B) and you just drag and drop files and the file pops up on their desktops, like Apple’s AirDrop flow.
There are a few WebRTC systems (file.pizza, sharedrop.io), but they don’t always work reliably and involves users opening the website or getting a file link via side channels.
TLDR; A locally installed GUI where one can add peers and drag drop files to instantly push it to them like AirDrop. The peers ought to have the util installed too. UX is key. Press a hotkey to reveal the GUI. Drag, drop, forget in under two seconds.
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That’s so relatable…had a similar idea a while back…dumped it into Evernote and forgot about it. I guess this is motivation to go ahead and build it…
I guess for speed the app would have to be native and some good low-level file-system/storage and network magic would be fun to implement.
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This is like sharedrop.io. I’m referring to a locally installable utility that works over LAN + Internet, allows you to configure named peers (for easy drag and drop), and works on a “push” model like Airdrop without needing to share links.
I’ve been a Thunderbird user for the longest time. Rock solid with tons of features. There isn’t another (FOSS) mail client that compares. I think a lot of people shy away from it because of its UI, which isn’t bad, but may not be up to “modern” standards. It still uses XUL for rendering its UIs, so with a lot of work and difficulty, it may be possible to refactor its UI if an addon’s written for that. Just throwing it out there!
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Using this post to put out some of my ideas and get feedback.
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Lazykubernetes - I am an avid user of lazy docker and every time I work with Kubernetes I wish a proper CUI tool exists for Kubernetes. Many others whom I have worked with felt the need for something like lazydocker for Kubernetes.
https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazydocker -
YourFont - It is 2020 and very few opensource solutions exist to create a font style on your own. The goal is to create a cross-platform mobile app to draw your own font and export it as a font style. Inspired to create this from https://sachachua.com/blog/2020/06/pythonfontforgeorg-i-made-a-font-based-on-my-handwriting/
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Pdfbot- Many organizations are investing time in creating custom PDF templates, wouldn’t the world be a better place if an opensource WYSIWYG tool to create PDF templates with variables, rules exists. The templates can be used to generate dynamic PDFs via API. Something like bannerbear for PDF.
I personally use KDEConnect for Android <-> Linux Mint sharing. I love it. It’s an open protocol and it integrates into any desktop environment. For GNOME, there’s gsconnect which uses the same protocol. KDEConnect is also available for Windows (beta).
Once you install it, there’ll be a right click -> share option in file manager. KDE Apps integrate well with KDEConnect, once you take a screenshot with Spectacle, you can directly send it to phone too. If you’re watching a movie and a phone call comes, movie will be paused and resumed after phone call ends. KDEConnect is pretty neat.
I’ve used KDEConnect in college network and was able to send file to a person in a different building through LAN. KDEConnect I believe doesn’t have file share over the internet currently.
I built WebDrop.Space to avoid the installation part and it does take inspiration from KDEConnect. Like you go to a photostat place, and instead of emailing the file to print, you can use WebDrop, this helps me in college. Since it’s web, it’s cross platform and works alright.
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HRX
Most of the large product-based companies use different software to manage Human resources and business partners. An open-source alternative would help to cater to the needs of small and medium-scale companies to manage time-sheets, appraisal, competency management all in one platform.
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A social network like abstraction for the open web, based on RSS feeds and static sites. (I might not get time to work on this, so putting it out).
Github pages, gitlab pages, netlify, etc exists which makes static sites and having a web-presence effectively free for individuals. But the boilerplate required to create a static site, and the git-fu necessary to update/maintain it makes it difficult for people. That’s why people use Twitter, Facebook, Mastodon, Diaspora, etc. (ActivityPub is a decentralized protocol, but you still need to run a server to retain control over your website.)
So, why not just make it easy for people to publish and update their static websites, and follow other static websites using RSS/Atom feed?
Things required:
- A mobile application that can
- provide an abstraction over the posts management of a static site generator (like jekyll)
- commit files to git
- push to github/gitlab/etc
- configure gitlab pages/github pages/netlify
- follow RSS feeds and display them like social media timeline
- Discovery server?
- Might need a server to allow discovery. How might this work? Google search?
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How do y’all manage your photos, backups ? There is nextcloud, and it has a photo addon now. But for the average user, it’s hard to set a server up even locally. Photo addon is about to have a face recognition sort : https://github.com/nextcloud/photos/issues/144
I want to see something like Google Photos, but offline, with face recognition and sort photos by people/year/tags. I’ve been working on this idea for some months now, an electron app that searches a folder for photos with particular faces, it works, but is slow. I’d like to generally know how y’all manage photos.
There is KPhotoAlbum, but it doesn’t have face recognition.
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BigBlueButton is really awesome, a very good alternative to Zoom. There’s a public instance at https://meet.nixnet.services/
If you are not aware, Geary is a good email client focused on UI/UX. But it lacks features, when comparing with Thunderbird.
It will be great if someone work on top of it, rather than creating something from scratch.
A FOSS desktop TOTP client
Proprietary clients like Google Authenticator and Authy can be used as reference.
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I’ve tried Geary in the past, but it comes nowhere near Thunderbird. I’ve hundreds of thousands of e-mails going back two decades and forget lag, TB doesn’t even jitter. I don’t mind TB’s slightly clunky UI, but if it could be revamped, it could find greater adoption!