Ask HN: What apps did you build for yourself and why? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What apps did you build for yourself and why?

#41

Post by _7jf7 » Fri, May 25, 2018, 7:17 PM UTC

I’ve built Fog[1] which is an Overcast[2] wrapper for macOS. I started it because I wanted to listen to podcasts on the Desktop but also wanted to control playback via media keys. I’ve since added a few more features.

I’ve made SandwichTimer[3] because no other pomodoro timer did what I wanted — to be minimally controllable via the CLI (so I could do it from Alfred[4], without needing the mouse) and to show the remaining time just as minutes (seconds are distracting, and a pie isn’t accurate enough). Since I also frequently needed regular timers and needed to use the phone for those, I’ve baked that in as well.

PinPlus[5] because I wanted a simple app to add Pinboard[6] bookmarks that looked good and I could dismiss with ⎋.

Sacar Musak[7] not for me, but for my friends that want to download videos from Youtube and kept downloading shady apps I did not trust.

I have a ton more in the form of CLI tools, but the apps I use most frequently are the Alfred Workflows I’ve made[8].

[1]: https://github.com/vitorgalvao/fog

[2]: https://overcast.fm/

[3]: https://github.com/vitorgalvao/sandwichtimer

[4]: https://www.alfredapp.com/

[5]: https://github.com/vitorgalvao/pinplus

[6]: https://pinboard.in/

[7]: https://github.com/vitorgalvao/sacar-musak

[8]: https://github.com/vitorgalvao/alfred-workflows

Re: Ask HN: What apps did you build for yourself and why?

#42

Post by will_dev_4_food » Fri, May 25, 2018, 7:18 PM UTC

A built a free password helper for iOS because I’ve accepted that password reuse sucks, but so do traditional password managers. So this app takes snippets from valid site information and uses a secure hash algorithm which creates a binary, which I map to an string of ascii values to generate a password. It includes a per site salt and a device specific code to counter reverse engineering attempts. The salt can be which whatever you want, and you must remember a final passphrase (if you use one) to get the passwords regenerated. You have to kind of keep track of the length of these generated passwords yourself, because it’s truncated for differing password lengths. Anyway, on the whole imho it’s more secure than many a password manager on the market, save that it’s still new and requires use of copy/paste buffers. But, all of that is of course predicated on using the tool correctly, and using caution with passwords, which you should do anyway.

The App is DyfynderX if you’re interested. The name comes from dyfnder, which is the Welsh word for depth.

Re: Ask HN: What apps did you build for yourself and why?

#43

Post by desaiguddu » Mon, May 28, 2018, 5:45 AM UTC

I built a macOS App last year for managing Screen Shots.

I run a development agency and love taking snapshots from various blogs & websites. They were getting difficult to manage.

So I created a small utility to manage screenshots on macOS.

https://shots.mobilefirst.in

Send me your feedback on this.

Re: Ask HN: What apps did you build for yourself and why?

#44

Post by Artemix » Wed, May 30, 2018, 12:06 PM UTC

timojaask wrote: post #28

Artemix wrote: post #21

I built an image sharing utility connected to a friend's service, because I wanted to be able to directly share an image from anywhere on my phone without going on his website. https://pix.artemix.org/

Nice. I was actually looking for a simple image host with an API that I could use for a personal project, and didn't know about Pix. Ended up using Cloudinary, which is way overblown for my needs. Maybe I'll make an iOS port of your app!

If you do so, don't hesitate to contact me so I can also advertise it, and send the information to the service's owner, a friend of mine.