Find some WordPress bugs/issues/features and start hacking away [1] or find another open-source project to contribute some PHP work to.
[1] http://codex.wordpress.org/Developer_Documentation#Contribut...
Ask HN: Give me some PHP project or web app ideas
11–20 of 51 posts
Re: Ask HN: Give me some PHP project or web app ideas
#12My favorite method for generating ideas is this:
1) Find a task I have. If I want to make money later from this idea, this task should probably be something I already pay money for, but if I just want to make my life easier, than forget the money part. My credit card statement is a great place to look for the money making ones. Once I have the task...
2) List out all the steps this task has. Be as detailed as you can.
3) Figure out how to remove as many steps as possible.
Seems simple, but I don't see people doing this very much. Instead they focus on making something because it sounds cool or is going to be the next Facebook for people who use Groupon.
OXO is one of my favorite examples of doing this. They make household goods.
1) Task: they studied the tasks people have in the kitchen. They watched how people cooked and baked using measuring cups.
2) Steps: one of the weird steps people have in cooking with measuring cups is when they lift the cup to see the water level against the cups ruler. They would do this 4 or 5 times trying to get an accurate amount of water in their cup.
3) Remove: they figured out they could add the measuring cups ruler to the top of the measuring cup so that people could see the measurement while they used the kitchen faucet to add water. They no longer needed to lift the cup up to read the level.
So simple, but they shaved off those 4-5 extra steps, and they sold millions of their new measuring cups in 18 months.
They innovated on a measuring cup. Pretty inspiring when you think of how long measuring cups have been around and how simple they are. There are so many newer more complicated things around us today that could use the simplification above.
Re: Ask HN: Give me some PHP project or web app ideas
#13You can probably do a simple Twitter-like application, it's simple CRUD and shouldn't be difficult (It's used both in Rails for Zombies and the Rails Book as example iirc)
A simple blog engine isn't complicated either.
Re: Ask HN: Give me some PHP project or web app ideas
#14My favorite method for generating ideas is this: 1) Find a task I have. If I want to make money later from this idea, this task should probably be something I already pay money for, but if I just want to make my life easier, than forget the money part. My credit card statement is a great place to look for the money making ones. Once I have the task... 2) List out all the steps this task has. Be as detailed as you can…
I saw a good example of this at the LA Car Show yesterday. The new Honda Odyssey minivan has a vacuum cleaner built in to the cargo area, with an extendable hose that can reach all the way to the driver seat. Such a simple idea, I can't imagine how no other manufacturer ever thought of it before.
Re: Ask HN: Give me some PHP project or web app ideas
#15My favorite method for generating ideas is this: 1) Find a task I have. If I want to make money later from this idea, this task should probably be something I already pay money for, but if I just want to make my life easier, than forget the money part. My credit card statement is a great place to look for the money making ones. Once I have the task... 2) List out all the steps this task has. Be as detailed as you can…
The Oxo measuring cup is indeed very clever and solves a real problem.
Here's a picture for those (like me) that couldn't quite picture it from nate's description: http://www.amazon.com/OXO-Grips-2-Cup-Angled-Measuring/dp/B0...
Re: Ask HN: Give me some PHP project or web app ideas
#16Try this method (for mobile apps): http://mobileappchat.com/mylyrics-giacomo-balli/
Re: Ask HN: Give me some PHP project or web app ideas
#17My favorite method for generating ideas is this: 1) Find a task I have. If I want to make money later from this idea, this task should probably be something I already pay money for, but if I just want to make my life easier, than forget the money part. My credit card statement is a great place to look for the money making ones. Once I have the task... 2) List out all the steps this task has. Be as detailed as you can…
I saw a good example of this at the LA Car Show yesterday. The new Honda Odyssey minivan has a vacuum cleaner built in to the cargo area, with an extendable hose that can reach all the way to the driver seat. Such a simple idea, I can't imagine how no other manufacturer ever thought of it before.
What about that great feature where accidentally leaving a cabin light on completely drains the battery so that you can't start the car? Why do so many cars still allow this to happen? I'm no electrical engineer, but it can't be so hard to measure battery life and automatically cut power to the cabin when it gets below a certain threshold.
Re: Ask HN: Give me some PHP project or web app ideas
#18PHP forum scripts are mostly horrible, out of date and bug-ridden messes. Make something simpler and better that's not a service.
If this is actually a problem you currently have, I've heard great things about FluxBB[0], it's built on Laravel and also powers the Laravel forums.
EDIT: Its alpha 2.0 is built on Laravel and is a complete rebuild.
Re: Ask HN: Give me some PHP project or web app ideas
#19thinking about some AI technologies like Natural Language interfaces, intelligent OCR scanners, video crawler with using machine vision .... etc
I've been bouncing the idea around in my head for a while to predict the weather in an area from a photostream (ie flickr, twitter, etc). More brightness -> hotter is a simple correlation, but you could extract a lot of interesting image and meta features, I am sure (for instance, maybe people take less indoor photos in the summer).
This is more of a "fun" project in realtime, but historical weather data is actually very valuable for things like energy price prediction, and is pretty hard to get. I don't know what the market is like, but there is almost definitely one (I would be a customer if the data is accurate).
Re: Ask HN: Give me some PHP project or web app ideas
#20My favorite method for generating ideas is this: 1) Find a task I have. If I want to make money later from this idea, this task should probably be something I already pay money for, but if I just want to make my life easier, than forget the money part. My credit card statement is a great place to look for the money making ones. Once I have the task... 2) List out all the steps this task has. Be as detailed as you can…
Second that.
I implemented a task I need and sold it for about $100,000 total to other people.
That's a rule - if you have a problem - chances are - lots of other people have the same problem for solving which they'd be more than happy to pay.