Ask HN: What simple web apps do you wish existed? Seeking ideas for sample apps
I'm looking for ideas for simple web apps that people wish existed. I plan to select some of those ideas and implement a “v0” or prototype version of the idea using PyCob, a Python project that makes it easy to create web apps using just Python. The easiest types of apps to implement would be Python libraries that you wish there were a front-end for. I’ll post the demo and code here: https://www.pycob.com/
If you have an idea for a simple web app that you think would be useful or fun, please share it in the comments below. These are some examples of demo apps we’ve made:
PyPi Analytics: Show trends of how many downloads PyPi packages have over time
HN Analytics: Find the best time to post on Hacker News
Dataframe Explorer: Choose fields from a dataframe to pivot and graph the results
App Wizard: Generate Python code for a CRUD app
Book Summary: Choose a book and get a 10 bullet point summary AI Regex Generator: Give the app 3 examples and have AI (try to) generate a regex pattern
Warranty Claims: Allow users to submit warranty claims and track status of replacement parts
These are just a few examples – feel free to suggest any kind of app you can think of!
Thanks in advance for your ideas. I'm excited to see the ideas, and I look forward to implementing some of these apps using PyCob.
Thanks!
59 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 128 ms ] threadI want to open up a webpage and see, for my local device:
- CPU (core count, manufacturer)
- Memory
- GPU present
- Disk size, free space
- IP4 and IP6 addresses
- Ping to different countries main providers
- My geolocation and altitude
- A pin point of that on an embedded (free, ideally SVG, global) map that doesn't need to specify layers/metadata/cities/countries just show me the projection of lat long onto the globe of the earth and the contours of continents
- My current velocity
- Any sites I'm logged in to or identified by
- My browser version and known exploits against it
- My OS version and known exploits against it
- Connection speed ( link capacity, actual up and down, and rates per second )
- Screen dimensions and capabilities
- Output of any other accessible sensors: gyro, bluetooth, wifi, whatever
I created as much of this as I could lazily so far at https://mycapabilities.me (github pages is borking HTTPS for me tho)
That's a soft JSON not a must-be JSON. I'd kill for an all markdown workflow where I could build content/blog posts in my markdown app (Logseq) by selecting a layout template, writing the articles and selecting pictures, and then I could kick off a simple upload process to my web server.
Live App: https://markdown-to-json.pycob.app/
Source Code: https://github.com/pycob/prototypes/blob/main/markdown-to-js...
If you're trying to convert markdown documents into webpages, the most likely output format would surely be HTML, or perhaps something custom to the site like MediaWiki markup.
It's totally possible that a site would allow for new documents to be uploaded in a JSON format, but the format would have to be specified (e.g. which keys are used for the post body and subject) - so "whatever you deem best" is unlikely to work, it would need to be "whatever my webhost expects, which is documented -here-"
I'm happy to be wrong here, and zainhoda's markdown to JSONified HTML is interesting regardless - but I suspect you really wanted a markdown to HTML converter. ex: https://markdowntohtml.com/ or something more extreme like a static site generator: https://www.getzola.org/
I left the decision to him because why interfere with someone else who probably has a stronger handle on their own strengths. As for your webhost concern, I can always change webhosts.
Something that would store phrases associated with people with an incremental counter. Obviously the list of phrases, people, and counts are unique to the user.
This way I can say to my daughter, "I've told you <checks webapp> 46 times now to clean up your room!"
Dumb, but fun :)
Don't clean your house ever, start leaving your dirty clothes outside her room, don't wash the dishes, don't take out the trash, let it smell.
Make your daughter be the to tell you "I told you 46 times to clean up the house!".
Add an immutable time stamp to the phrase, so I can say “Alice warned Bob about that problem on DD-MM-YYYY” so that when Bob gets hit with it 6 months later, exactly as Alice predicted, Bob can’t say “You never told me that”
As someone with a near perfect verbal memory (I can recall conversations verbatim from my whole life) it’s incredibly frustrating to have people deny that I told them something, when I can recall the exact date, time and words, when I did :P
https://github.com/python273/twitter-reader
I have at times also wished I had this for just about any sort of data tagging. Give it an array of json objects, it displays the data and then lets you swipe super quickly through all the objects in the array, semi-randomly choosing which objects to compare. Would need to write the data out as well - that's the product.
This is probably worth a couple hundred bucks to me if anyone wants to build it and open source under a commercial-reuse allowed license. Every year I spend dozens of hours doing this and don't feel like I have done a great job of making the correct comparisons.
The home page is a setup where you setup your dataframe. If you already have some csv or something, you can read that rather than getting user input.
The app will randomly select 2 rows of the dataframe and display them as side-by-side VS cards. You then pick the winner from the two. Then the app will repeat random selection/winner as many times as you want.
There's a results page that shows the ELO ranking of all the "players" as well as the history of all the "games" between the players.
I implemented not with a "swipe" interface but just with side-by-side cards and you click on one. It wasn't clear to me how swiping would work when you're choosing a winner between 2 objects rather than making a yes/no decision. If you have an idea for how swipe would be useful, I'm all ears.
Live App: https://compare-and-rank.pycob.app/
Source Code: https://github.com/pycob/sample-apps/blob/main/compare-and-r...
If it did math while people were meeting and conversing and spat out an answer, that would be pretty cool.
I also like counting apps: take a picture of a bowl of Cheerios and it counts the 'O's, or the number of pipes in a rack at a hardware store.
I'm sure they've been engineered already or at least thought of before, but so far voice calculators seem slow and clunky like voice assistants, and counting apps lack surety and I wouldn't bet anyone's job on them that I've found so far.
There is already one out there that I use, but its very badly designed.
Yes. Plenty of such channels out there.
> saving the files would get costly after a while
You don't have the save the audio files. Its possible to just directly link, within the RSS feed, to the audio files hosted on youtube servers. The server simply has to periodically generate the RSS feed using YouTube api calls, and then host the RSS files. Surely, storing even 10s of thousands of RSS feeds won't cost that much. They aren't also being requested that often, so bandwidth costs are minimal.
> Would you pay for something like this?
Sure.
It doesn't create feeds out of playlists iirc. Sometimes on a large channel, you just want to listen to one particular series.
It doesn't let me choose the feed icon/image. Instead, the image is the text of the service name. This is very annoying because scrolling through my subscriptions on my podcast player, I primarily use the image to identify the one I am looking for.
A page change tracker that A: pumps the page through uBlock origin before each snapshot and B; produces an RSS feed with a summary of changes.
A web page to epub converter that A: sends the page through uBlock origin or similar, B: sends the result through the postlight parser, and then C: gives the user a chance to customize the result before packaging it up as an epub. Customisation would include setting a cover image (or none,) setting a title and other metadata, choosing to include a TOC or not, renaming any chapters if a TOC is included, etc. Currently my workflow for this involves someone's "web page to epub" converter personal project that isn't entirely designed for single pages and a bunch of time on Sigil cleaning up the resulting output.
For example:
- an app that forecasts the weather where you are in 1 sentence.
- an app that summarises user reviews of points of interest around you.
- an app to summarise YouTube videos based on their transcripts.
- an app that describes your address in 1 sentence as you would to an emergency service (“26 miles West of Placename on E25” or “on the corner of Eve drive and Redmond Avenue”, or “at Trafalgar square”). Shown with a map with all used place names for confirmation.
- an alternative history daily news generator with several settings (cyberpunk, soviets won space race, world peace, world war 3, Nazis won WW2, the Earth is flat, brave new world, etc).
- an endless text based adventure game where AI gives you some story and a verb each turn. You can set a theme in the beginning in 40 characters.
- an app to transcribe and summarize voice recordings, for lectures and journaling (should be sanitized for jailbreak instructions but would be a useful app).
- an API or app to generate long memorable pass phrases (based on semi random context like a random Wikipedia page).
For example, here's what ChatGPT comes up with when asked to create some short rhyming passphrases with symbols or numbers:
* "Not all who seek, find."
* "Speak with kindness - inspire greatness."
* "Wise to listen 1st before speaking."
How about this entropy? These are the final bosses of passwords.
https://github.com/paddymul/dcf-server
Web UI with a form + Table Exploration from Database would be great.