I think this is pretty cool and a great idea. One thing that I ran into within a couple minutes is that there are several entries that don't have enough context. It will just say something like "is there an app?".
I love this and have bookmarked it for daily review.
If I can make one recommendation, add a search function. That way users can find all the recommendations that touch on some field that's important to them.
For example, I'm working on an app for ebook authoring. It would be awesome to search through these for any ebook related app requests. It could help me to spot patterns related to my field, and give me ideas not just for apps but for features.
If I can make a second recommendation, make those search results subscribe-able... like a Google Alerts for Twitter-based app requests.
As someone who built a website called (roughly) "$5 business ideas" about 12 years ago this gives me great joy!
It was mostly satire but still fun to build and populate with terrible ideas.
Yup, It's one simple lambda function that reads the JSON file from S3, searches twitter for new tweets since the latest, appends new ones and writes back to S3. Cron'd every minute.
You should go one level of abstraction further and make a site where users can aggregate arbitrary twitter search queries like this. AFAIK you can't actually "follow" a search query or hashtag on twitter.
Hey, self plugging my project - https://needgap.com A problem validation platform which serves similar purpose as OP but bit more nuanced as the problem statements need to be well defined and the QC is high.
"What the fuck do I need to do to stop seeing feet on my timeline why do people keep posting them? Is there an app that blocks all feet? Send help not feet"
Ironic, just before I read this comment I'd visited the crawler and the top teeth there was a foot fetish (the username mentioned feet and an onlyfans) twitter account wishing for an app to track who engagued with their tweets to run a contest or something.
This is great. Many years ago (5 or 6?) I started pulling down any tweet that had the phrase “there should be an app...” and saving to a database daily with the idea of making something similar to this. The script is still running and I have about 40,000 tweets saved. I think I’ll pick it back up, thanks for the inspiration!
How would you sort that? Some combination of length, girth, rigidity, recent reviews, proximity, and a checkbox for circ'd or uncirc'd... the query logic is, shall we say, quite hard.
Wow this is fascinating just for the entertainment. Especially liked this one...
> I need an app that sends me a notification 90 seconds before the sun reaches the exact position in the sky where it reflects off my neighbor's windows and blinds me.
Whoa that’s really cool! Also are you using some kind of IP to location? Was impressed you got my city right without needing location access
Edit: also super impressed by how fast the “shadow layers” are calculated. I’m in Switzerland and people here will love this ... knowing exactly when you’ll get sun in a valley is super useful. This might be something you could sell to people like search.ch - they could combine with the weather at meteo.search.ch - if you want an introduction say the word
I do use an IP to geo database. It puts you in NYC if the IP is unrecognized.
I checked out search.ch. Looks like a great add to Weather Animations section. I’ll try reaching out to you via Twitter. In the meantime please share with anyone who finds it useful. I use it for hiking and snow conditions myself!
Enriching the responses with demographic data, extracting interesting features with NLP and then clustering against those features could give you some good insights.
I.e. Millennials in Belgium are not happy with their toy stores.
Lots of interesting ideas on here! Very cool site.
Here's a pair of related tweets I found:
> dear coders: I need an app that will scan receipts from contractors, automatically pull the relevant info re: business name, type of service, date, receipt #, etc, and file it in my phone contacts with a 1 year reminder on my calendar for future maintenance calls.
Maybe I'm old school, but this seems like something that would take upwards of five minutes to add to my calendar and wouldn't require a whole other account + login.
Yeah I find that calendar and a free-form note app cover pretty much everything "miscellaneous" on my phone. The only other apps I really use are maps, contacts, email, and web browser.
Okay I have a legitimate question: for random things you need to do in a long timeframe (ex. Change the Air Filters in 6 months) do you add it to your calendar? Siri for example would add it for exactly 6 months to the day from now, and what if that is a Tuesday and you'd rather do it at a more convenient time?
Adding it to reminders would have an enormous number of pending reminders it feels like
As soon as it pops up on your calendar, it's now a 'to-do'. Manage that the same way you manage your other to-dos, wether that's a reminder or a sticky note or a list or whatever.
I built it to scratch an itch especially for reminders. You can snooze reminders, for an hour, a day, or a week. I snooze them all the time until I’m ready to do it.
I personally would open up my calendar, flip six months later, and then pick a convenient time, since there is wiggle room on getting something like that done. I'd probably add it for a weekend and add a notification to go off a few days prior.
In Google Calendar, it would less than a minute, based on a quick test I just did.
There are so many B2B apps that will do the first one. It’s called job management, and it’s a massive product category. But none of it is as simple as ‘download this app and take a photo’ because every business is slightly different.
And while your app could start so simple, and perfectly aligned with their use case, next they’ll want something else, and you’ll want more customers, so the customisation options begin. Until it’s so complicated to get it to do anything that it requires a consultant to set it up.
But will they really pay for it? Because at present they’ve chosen to tweet rather than google. And google + money would have solved this already.
> Lots of interesting ideas on here! Very cool site.
> Here's a pair of related tweets I found:
> > dear coders: I need an app that will scan receipts from contractors, automatically pull the relevant info re: business name, type of service, date, receipt #, etc, and file it in my phone contacts with a 1 year reminder on my calendar for future maintenance calls.
> Together these might form an interesting app idea.
> Lots of interesting ideas on here! Very cool site.
> Here's a pair of related tweets I found:
> > dear coders: I need an app that will scan receipts from contractors, automatically pull the relevant info re: business name, type of service, date, receipt #, etc, and file it in my phone contacts with a 1 year reminder on my calendar for future maintenance calls.
> I need an app that’ll remind me when my cards are about to expire. Cards, passport, even products. Need.
A tiny self mailing Google App script set to run daily and hooked up to a spreadsheet with expiration dates can do the job, no need for an app. Email reports are sent in case of any runtime crashes.
I want an app that takes me on a timed, random drive; like I wanna drive around for an hour, map me a course that winds backroads and brings me back home in that timeframe
I wanted a similar app, but A to B, rather than round trips.
Best I could do with the majors is disable highways & toll roads, but often it would still try to take similar routes.
BJ Landcruiser tops out at ~120k, and who wants to go in straight lines on highways. More fun to try and find a fire road it can’t get down. Still searching.
Save your breath for useful activism such as electric cars, cycling and renewables. Shaming people for having a good time is pointless and counterproductive.
> Can there be anything more destructive to society??
Yeah. Just about every modern industry. Even aggregated across all people, personal creation of "pollution" is all but insignificant compared top industry.
"The evidence, unfortunately, comes in the form of the worst pandemic to hit humanity in a century. We were confined. We were quarantined, and in many places still are. Forced by an insidious parasite, many of us dramatically slashed our individual carbon footprints by not driving to work and flying on planes. Yet, critically, the true number global warming cares about — the amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide saturating the atmosphere — won’t be impacted much by an unprecedented drop in carbon emissions in 2020 (a drop the International Energy Agency estimates at nearly eight percent compared to 2019). This means bounties of carbon from civilization’s cars, power plants, and industries will still be added (like a bank deposit) to a swelling atmospheric bank account of carbon dioxide. But 2020’s deposit will just be slightly less than last year’s. In fact, the levels of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere peaked at an all-time high in May — because we’re still making big carbon deposits."
I found that quote really hard to parse, but I think what it’s saying is the derivative of CO2 concentration in the air did become negative. Not sure what that has to do with individual contributions to emissions vs industries. I’m not sure the distinction even makes sense, since industries are composed of individuals (any individual emission can also be allocated to one or more industries, and any industrial emission can be allocated to one or more individuals).
Well, yes, because people continued to purchase things that were made in ways that had a fossil fuel footprint–be it meat or clothing or consumer electronics. The issue with the fossil fuel footprint is not "big companies shouldn't guilt you into reducing your carbon emissions", it should be "carbon footprints are not holistic enough to capture the full supply chain of how your choices emit carbon" and "large carbon emitters that are not meaningfully affected by the market should be taxed so that their externalities become apparent".
This is why I stay home and hone the edge of my flensing knife instead. No pollution and no worrying about a dull blade the next time I'm waist deep in the blood and viscera of a whalefish.
I think you make a good point, just no need for the hyperbole. We should all be thinking through the downsides of our ideas not just the "hey wouldn't it be neat..." part.
Unsure if that's a joke, but no! That is absolutely not what you would rely on! You can't simply delegate all ethics to the level of the individual user! Your actions matter, the technology you create shapes the world, and you have to consider the consequences of it.
I was eyeing up a satnav for my motorcycle, one option it had was to create a windy, indirect, touristy route instead of the fastest / most efficient one. It was an interesting one.
But in the end I couldn't justify paying €400 for something that my phone could do. I know, motorcycle satnavs are hardened, deal with direct sunlight better, work offline and are much more energy efficient, but still. I feel like at that time (this was only a few years ago) those systems should be a lot better already, like offloading work to your phone (becoming more of an external screen), etc.
"I wish there was an app like find my iPhone but “find my glasses” because fuckers keep getting lost"
Argh, can relate. Terrible catch-22 when you can't see well enough to find your glasses. Also, for reasons I don't understand, my wife owns a zillion pairs of cheap readers that sort of look like my glasses.
You'll have to go a little further back. After I switched to round lenses, I couldn't see the frame as well in my peripheral vision, which led to me looking for my glasses as they were on my face.
"I’ve got to do a letter drop across 30+ local addresses. Is there an app that can plan the optimal route?" well,we still need a bit of research for this...
30+(a number smaller than, say, a hundred or two) is totally brute forcable.
I have a python script that plans walking routes between attractions at a large-ish festival that pre-calculates shortest paths by brute forcing dijkstra's algorithm between every pair of ~200 "intersections" in a minute or two on my laptop. (The app can then just look up the route by start/end location and draw it on a map)
Travelling salesman is hard, but even O(n!) is trivial on machines today where n is small. And there are simplifications and approximations that get something like within 1% of the theoretical shortest path in something like O(n log(n)) time (with significant startup/preprocessing time, but where N is between a few thousand and a few million these work).
It's a classic NP-Hard problem. And depending on the size of the sample we can have pretty much the best route available, but we still don't have a way to solve this 100% accurately (particularly for large sample size)
I paid for the 30x500 course (so far not worth it :-( ... it anyway the point of the whole thing is to first identify your audience, then find where they hang out online and then do this kind of research.
This coukd be linked up with Rand Fishkin's new thing where he has found a million people's twitter bios and linkedin bios and can therefore find "people who post a lot about sailing and work in finance".
But honestly, it casts a wide net and I think I need to niche down.
It was just a dump run of videos (I think they changed it that year). And it's me to be fair. But for the price I kinda expected more human involvement. I am taking another run with some more motivation now.
If I can make one suggestion: make clicking any part of the Tweet card element go to the Tweet in context. That's the main action I will want to take, so it's a little annoying that it's relegated to one small link in the top right.
I don't think this happens frequently enough to make it viable... but
I think the other missing piece is App creators could register for problems that they solve and then your bot replies and says "There is an app for X <link to app store>"
132 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 207 ms ] threadIf I can make one recommendation, add a search function. That way users can find all the recommendations that touch on some field that's important to them.
For example, I'm working on an app for ebook authoring. It would be awesome to search through these for any ebook related app requests. It could help me to spot patterns related to my field, and give me ideas not just for apps but for features.
If I can make a second recommendation, make those search results subscribe-able... like a Google Alerts for Twitter-based app requests.
/vaguely informed guessing
By the way, you should definitely add this to your CV. It's the sort of technical thing that really stands out from other candidates.
helpless giggling
Sounds like someone wants an upgrade to Tinder/Grindr.
> I need an app that sends me a notification 90 seconds before the sun reaches the exact position in the sky where it reflects off my neighbor's windows and blinds me.
https://twitter.com/DanEngler/status/1379616188020318208
[1] https://shademap.app
Edit: also super impressed by how fast the “shadow layers” are calculated. I’m in Switzerland and people here will love this ... knowing exactly when you’ll get sun in a valley is super useful. This might be something you could sell to people like search.ch - they could combine with the weather at meteo.search.ch - if you want an introduction say the word
I checked out search.ch. Looks like a great add to Weather Animations section. I’ll try reaching out to you via Twitter. In the meantime please share with anyone who finds it useful. I use it for hiking and snow conditions myself!
I.e. Millennials in Belgium are not happy with their toy stores.
Here's a pair of related tweets I found:
> dear coders: I need an app that will scan receipts from contractors, automatically pull the relevant info re: business name, type of service, date, receipt #, etc, and file it in my phone contacts with a 1 year reminder on my calendar for future maintenance calls.
https://twitter.com/LDBurnett/status/1379785147294310405
> I need an app that’ll remind me when my cards are about to expire. Cards, passport, even products. Need.
https://twitter.com/newii/status/1379439739615514627
Together these might form an interesting app idea.
Adding it to reminders would have an enormous number of pending reminders it feels like
I built it to scratch an itch especially for reminders. You can snooze reminders, for an hour, a day, or a week. I snooze them all the time until I’m ready to do it.
In Google Calendar, it would less than a minute, based on a quick test I just did.
And while your app could start so simple, and perfectly aligned with their use case, next they’ll want something else, and you’ll want more customers, so the customisation options begin. Until it’s so complicated to get it to do anything that it requires a consultant to set it up.
But will they really pay for it? Because at present they’ve chosen to tweet rather than google. And google + money would have solved this already.
> Here's a pair of related tweets I found:
> > dear coders: I need an app that will scan receipts from contractors, automatically pull the relevant info re: business name, type of service, date, receipt #, etc, and file it in my phone contacts with a 1 year reminder on my calendar for future maintenance calls.
> https://twitter.com/LDBurnett/status/1379785147294310405
> > I need an app that’ll remind me when my cards are about to expire. Cards, passport, even products. Need.
> https://twitter.com/newii/status/1379439739615514627
> Together these might form an interesting app idea.
> Lots of interesting ideas on here! Very cool site.
> Here's a pair of related tweets I found:
> > dear coders: I need an app that will scan receipts from contractors, automatically pull the relevant info re: business name, type of service, date, receipt #, etc, and file it in my phone contacts with a 1 year reminder on my calendar for future maintenance calls.
> https://twitter.com/LDBurnett/status/1379785147294310405
> > I need an app that’ll remind me when my cards are about to expire. Cards, passport, even products. Need.
> https://twitter.com/newii/status/1379439739615514627
> Together these might form an interesting app idea.
> I need an app that’ll remind me when my cards are about to expire. Cards, passport, even products. Need.
A tiny self mailing Google App script set to run daily and hooked up to a spreadsheet with expiration dates can do the job, no need for an app. Email reports are sent in case of any runtime crashes.
hayo @red_hayonnaise
I want an app that takes me on a timed, random drive; like I wanna drive around for an hour, map me a course that winds backroads and brings me back home in that timeframe
I wanted a similar app, but A to B, rather than round trips.
Best I could do with the majors is disable highways & toll roads, but often it would still try to take similar routes.
BJ Landcruiser tops out at ~120k, and who wants to go in straight lines on highways. More fun to try and find a fire road it can’t get down. Still searching.
You can eg. avoid primary roads additionally to motorways and tolls.
(note, I'm a co-founder of GraphHopper)
Not only for car but also for motorcycle, bike, walking, ...
Can be further tweaked with preferring/avoiding curvy roads or elevation.
And GraphHopper also supports round trips.
I'd probably take the mountain biking directions, until the proper backroads and then hema maps are the best so far.
https://graphhopper.com/maps/?point=Gisborne%2C%203437%2C%20...
Lets me know if you ever do 4x4 mapping, although I can't imagine there's a strong business case for it.
Save your breath for useful activism such as electric cars, cycling and renewables. Shaming people for having a good time is pointless and counterproductive.
Yeah. Just about every modern industry. Even aggregated across all people, personal creation of "pollution" is all but insignificant compared top industry.
https://mashable.com/feature/carbon-footprint-pr-campaign-sh...
"The evidence, unfortunately, comes in the form of the worst pandemic to hit humanity in a century. We were confined. We were quarantined, and in many places still are. Forced by an insidious parasite, many of us dramatically slashed our individual carbon footprints by not driving to work and flying on planes. Yet, critically, the true number global warming cares about — the amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide saturating the atmosphere — won’t be impacted much by an unprecedented drop in carbon emissions in 2020 (a drop the International Energy Agency estimates at nearly eight percent compared to 2019). This means bounties of carbon from civilization’s cars, power plants, and industries will still be added (like a bank deposit) to a swelling atmospheric bank account of carbon dioxide. But 2020’s deposit will just be slightly less than last year’s. In fact, the levels of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere peaked at an all-time high in May — because we’re still making big carbon deposits."
https://trailrouter.com
HN discussion here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23802317
We definitely need ethics to be a core part of software dev training.
But in the end I couldn't justify paying €400 for something that my phone could do. I know, motorcycle satnavs are hardened, deal with direct sunlight better, work offline and are much more energy efficient, but still. I feel like at that time (this was only a few years ago) those systems should be a lot better already, like offloading work to your phone (becoming more of an external screen), etc.
We've lost so much magic in our lives because the phone is too easy to use. We've eliminated serendipity
Argh, can relate. Terrible catch-22 when you can't see well enough to find your glasses. Also, for reasons I don't understand, my wife owns a zillion pairs of cheap readers that sort of look like my glasses.
I have a python script that plans walking routes between attractions at a large-ish festival that pre-calculates shortest paths by brute forcing dijkstra's algorithm between every pair of ~200 "intersections" in a minute or two on my laptop. (The app can then just look up the route by start/end location and draw it on a map)
Travelling salesman is hard, but even O(n!) is trivial on machines today where n is small. And there are simplifications and approximations that get something like within 1% of the theoretical shortest path in something like O(n log(n)) time (with significant startup/preprocessing time, but where N is between a few thousand and a few million these work).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem
It's a classic NP-Hard problem. And depending on the size of the sample we can have pretty much the best route available, but we still don't have a way to solve this 100% accurately (particularly for large sample size)
This coukd be linked up with Rand Fishkin's new thing where he has found a million people's twitter bios and linkedin bios and can therefore find "people who post a lot about sailing and work in finance".
But honestly, it casts a wide net and I think I need to niche down.
So props on launching!!
(mid way through this comment, ctrl+f for twitter for easy find) https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/bvlv3q/does_any...
"Is there an app that you hate but always use?"
YES! Instagram. I hate the app. But I have to use it for business purposes.
If I can make one suggestion: make clicking any part of the Tweet card element go to the Tweet in context. That's the main action I will want to take, so it's a little annoying that it's relegated to one small link in the top right.
I think the other missing piece is App creators could register for problems that they solve and then your bot replies and says "There is an app for X <link to app store>"