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Ask HN: Did you work on a personal project over the holidays?

7 points by aroon ↗ HN
If you did, tell us about it! Post a link if applicable.

I'll get us started. I wrote a iPhone application that lets you load up an image from the camera or your photo album and point around in the image to find what color is at that point. Right now it breaks the color down to it's RGB value but I may include an option to see CMYK instead.

I did the project because my girlfriend is an artist and it's embarrasing when we talk about color and I don't know anything about it. I figured I can use this to figure out what color things are around me more precisely. As a side effect, I now have a much better understanding of CoreGraphics which is nice.

Between family fun, friend fun, catching up on sleep and catching up on movies I didn't find enough time to really finish and polish the app but I did prove the concept to myself. I'm hoping to find time over the next month to polish it up and publish it to the app store as a free app.

Hope everyone had a happy holidays.

11 comments

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espadagroup
I am starting a Hip Hop ad network. I did all the back end work and website development over the break.

MapJak.net

ktharavaad
Interesting post, I wish you'd elaborate a little bit more about what your iphone app does. From your current description, it sounds like a glorified color-picker.

And yes, I've been working on some interesting stuff which (coincidentally) also deals with image processing. I will show once I'm done with it.

aroon
That's pretty much right. I'd call it de-glorified if anything since you can't do anything after you "pick" a color. But the only other free alternative to this app was to take photos of stuff, somehow (email, iPhone sync, etc) get them on my computer, and then use some desktop image editing software to check out the colors in the image.

The app is much more on demand and I think it'll be fun to use when I'm doing non-brainy stuff like grocery shopping or sitting in a train.

More importantly, it's been really fun to write since I didn't really understand CoreGraphics before I started. I thought the app would be really easy to write since the idea is so simple but it's actually taken quite a bit of grunt work and a considerable amount of crawling through Apple developer docs.

I plan on sticking the app in the app store just for fun. I couldn't find an app that does what mine does for free. I think there were two alternatives, one that cost 10 bucks and was pretty sweet and one that was 5 bucks and sucked. If mine sucks, at least it'll be free! And if even 100 people download it I'll probably extend it to be able to email color swatches to people and save favorite colors.

pavelludiq
I wrote a blog in Django(not gonna use it, im a happy blogger.com user, just wanted to learn Django). Most of the time i was just reading documentation, because i don't know the API, the actual code is really short, like 2 classes and a handful of functions for the entire site.

Also, today my mouse died(good thing i had a spare), and i used its transparent case, its USB cable and a few LEDs i had laying around and made a desktop lamp to light my keyboard.

Mostly toy projects, to amuse my self, nothing worth showing to people, hope to improve next year :D

kleneway
I'm working on the finishing touches for the next phase of my "A Startup A Day" project. The goal is to bring together experienced entrepreneurs, high-potential hackers/designers, and (eventually) investors in a step-by-step process to build new companies.

First, users can collaborate to identify major market opportunities (aka 10x problems that desparately need a 10x solution). Members can then brainstorm potential solutions and the corresponding business model. After getting feedback from the community, members who want to tackle the idea can get paired up with a compatible co-founder and kick out a prototype. Members provide feedback on the prototypes and work with the team to help promote the app once it's ready for prime time.

Right now I'm keeping it invite-only for the alpha, but if you're a killer hacker with a keen sense of the big problems that everyday internet users are facing, drop me a line at kleneway@hotmail.com and I may be able to hook you up.

secos
I put http://myholidayapp.com up right before t-day to give people a place to let others know about their apps.

This holiday break, I worked on a charitable giving site, hopefully will have an initial release out by the end of the month.

bkrausz
This WordPress plugin was technically a client project, but it's for a non-profit so I did it for free as long as I could release it as open source. It being the first OSS I've started (rather than just contributed to), I got very attached to it. It is still short a few features, but I'm very happy with it and it seems to fill a much-needed niche in the WP community.

http://nerdlife.net/custom-taxonomies/

ttrashh
I had very little time since my wife just had a baby, she wanted something to do besides blogging while she is home, and I wanted to learn a bit about drupal so...

http://papersubmit.com

It's not finished but it's close. My wife will edit the content and post it. I figure it'll be a way to get some original content pretty easily. Maybe a few flyers at the local colleges. Anyone have any suggestions for getting some inbound links?

I'm an asp.net developer by day...I gotta say drupal is very nice. You can do a lot quickly with CCK + Views.

callmeed
Yes, I did actually.

I conceived and (almost) finished building a rails app. I'm gonna post it on HN shortly for review.

geuis
I've been spending the time working on a server-side javascript platform I'm calling Rapture. Uses lighttpd, V8 via llv8call(the v8 engine is freaking FAST), and couchdb. It's still very early but it's been really fun to work on. It's definitely me scratching a huge personal itch.
ejs
I spent a good amount of time writing code for http://overtrainer.com including adding a blog and incorporating some of the feedback I was given here on HN (Thanks again HN!)