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Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?

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Re: Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?

#351

Post by frontalier »

bomewish wrote: post #319
midgetjones wrote: post #120

A few years ago, my wife and I decided to adopt a rescue cat from battersea.org.uk. However, it was a frustrating experience as the staff didn't always update the website regularly, and we'd find that any suitable cats would be snapped up before we'd even seen them. I spotted that the website served its data to the frontend via an unsecured internal JSON API, so I built an Elixir app that would poll the API endpoint…

Why not go straight from the json to Twitter?

I'm not the author but one purpose the database may have is to keep state if the monitoring process needs to be restarted.

Re: Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?

#352

Post by 8organicbits »

strofocles wrote: post #320
8organicbits wrote: post #304

The chore wheel [1], which my wife and I used to run on an old iPad to track evening chores. It uses local storage for recurring chores and one-off reminders. We tried a bunch of other tools but they were all too full featured or slow to ooperate. It replaced a paper list. When debugging network issues I realized I was going back and forth between my computer, router, and cables under the desk. I created an audible n…

Honest question: I was looking at Wednesday and it said: Cook dinner, Dishes, Trash out. What is the usefulness of tracking this in the app since just entering the kitchen gives you instant status to each of them?

I put some generic defaults, but it works well for tasks that happen only on certain days. Taking trash to the curb once a week, packing bags for kids after school activities, etc. We liked checking things off the list, so we put obvious stuff too, but it's easy to forget infrequent tasks.

Re: Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?

#353

Post by ogou »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #324
ogou wrote: post #214

I moved to Berlin for the art scene. When trying to research galleries to visit or catch up on new exhibits, the number of bad websites was overwhelming. Over 300 sites to slog through. It took a long time just to navigate all the GDPR consents, newsletter asks, splash videos, and broken links. They also don't post their own address in many cases. So, I built a list of galleries from 3 different directories and came…

Unless you subscribe to Roger Ebert's belief that video games aren't art, you left out Computerschpielmuseum!

Cool place, but it doesn't show the work of individual artists in a rotating basis. It's more of a permanent museum. Also, they don't list the names of anybody involved in the games themselves, only brands. If games are art then they are worth attribution. Right?

Re: Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?

#354

Post by marginalia_nu »

I was annoyed by Wikipedia's noisy design choices, so I built a very scaled down read-friendly mirror of Wikipedia that presents the text as though it was a book, doing away with inline links. It's desktop-first as I don't really use mobile browsers, my fingers are too big.

https://encyclopedia.marginalia.nu/article/Hacker_News

Re: Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?

#356

Post by blackbear_ »

I created a Telegram bot [1] to help me keep track of expenses, grocery list, workouts, and random thoughts. The bot simply copies messages into a Google Sheet, which I then browse/analyze periodically. Some simple parsing logic splits the text into columns so that the data is already structured in the right way.

[1] https://t.me/gsheet_notes_bot

Re: Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?

#357

Post by bradrn »

bomewish wrote: post #340
bradrn wrote: post #198

Most of my programs were written for my own use, including: • A keyboard layout to type numerous non-English letters, punctuation marks and mathematical symbols, originally for Windows but subsequently ported to Linux and Mac [ https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey ] • A ‘sound change applier’ for my hobby of language construction, to simulate the process of historical sound change [ https://bradrn.com/brassica/ ] • A sma…

That third one sounds really great!

I actually don’t use it all that often, but it certainly is great to have when needed! I have considered putting the code online once or twice, but the setup is convoluted enough that documenting it probably would be a pain.

(It consists of one Firefox extension which can’t be installed on a normal browser, one SQLite database to store the text, one Haskell server to interact with the database, and one Qt frontend to present the results. It wasn’t trivial for me to set up.)

Re: Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?

#358

Post by xenopticon »

bcoughlan wrote: post #168

I made a tool to generate command line clients from OpenAPI definitions out of pure frustration from trying to stitch together incantations of curl commands to work with APIs. I haven't revisited it in a while, and the docs could probably do with some love, but I use it every day. [1] https://github.com/bcoughlan/openapi-commander

This is super cool. Many startups are offering OpenAPI -> SDK, but I've never seen anything that generates a command-line tool.
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