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

At first I was using lush.nvim to build sunburn.nvim, but quickly it became a hassle to only be able to specify colors via RGB or HSL. My initial thought was a PR to add Oklab support to lush, but that framework does so much that it was hard to see where to start. So I ended up writing polychrome.nvim[2], which is a dead simple micro framework in comparison to lush.nvim, but does enough to take care of all the boilerplate, and supports a bunch of color spaces (which are converted to RGB on the fly).

I also wanted push notifications for when certain RSS feeds I follow were updated, because I suck at remembering to check in on things or check an RSS feed app. But I didn't want to pay for IFTTT or other bespoke solutions, so I wrote notifeed[3]. It's designed to run as a service on a server, and then check all your feeds at predetermined intervals and send the necessary webhooks based on your configuration. Feeds and clients are configured via the CLI and stored in a SQLite DB for simplicity.

[1] https://github.com/loganswartz/sunburn.nvim

[2] https://github.com/loganswartz/polychrome.nvim

[3] https://github.com/loganswartz/notifeed

The idea is first-time senders will be moved out of your inbox and you will get a screener to manually whitelist/blacklist them.

Am now trying to productize it, my thesis is emails will becoming even spammier now that LLMs can pass the Turing test, so a feature like this will be key to restore sanity to your inbox.

> and Traditional Chinese/the Taiwanese variant is just an afterthought

> only has Chinese to English, but no monolingual definitions which are preferable for advanced learners

I don't quite get it. You can distinguish "Mandarin Chinese as spoken in China" from "Mandarin Chinese as spoken in Taiwan"; for example, the concept "the day after [a contextual event]" is translated 隔天 in the Taiwanese dub of We Don't Talk About Bruno, but it's 第二天 in the mainland dub. This reflects real usage differences, but this is mostly a matter of what phrasing people are likely to use; to the best of my knowledge, what you might consider characteristically Taiwanese usages are mostly still valid on the mainland, and vice versa. I'm not getting lost trying to understand Taiwanese music, or at least not more so than for mainland music. Mainlanders have no problems speaking to locals in Taiwan; Taiwanese have no problems speaking to locals on the mainland.

But that has nothing to do with simplified vs traditional characters, which is a spelling difference, not a language difference. Any electronic dictionary will handle that seamlessly.

(And I'm a little concerned... how do you study Chinese for "a few years" without knowing the difference between a language and a spelling system? In Hong Kong they use traditional characters too, and they use them to write Cantonese!)

And then, of your other points, they all seem to be complaints about the dictionary, not about the software. Get dictionaries that are relevant to you!

> Instead of Hanyu Pinyin, Willow utilizes Zhuyin, the phonetic system used in Taiwan, to aid in accurate pronunciation learning.

Pinyin and zhuyin are exactly equivalent. Every syllable in one system corresponds to a single syllable in the other system. How does one better aid accurate pronunciation learning than the other?

Pinyin is used on the mainland and zhuyin is used in Taiwan; you're certainly better off learning zhuyin if you're planning to live in Taiwan. But on your assumption that you already know both systems, what does one do that the other one doesn't?

Now it's my playground for new technologies and ideas.

https://oorja.io