Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use? • Hacker News Board

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

#641

Post by sandreas » Wed, Dec 13, 2023, 7:49 PM UTC

I created a few audio tinkering utilities, e.g.

- m4b-tool[1], an audio book utility

- tone[2], an audio tagger

mainly for myself because the existing tools did not fit my needs or weren't FOSS. I did never think so many people would be interested. By the end of the year I plan to make my first donation of my github sponsoring income to a charity project.

Currently I'm working on `pure-todo`, a todo list with sqlite, REST API and JWT based user management. The first approach was to publish it with a single index.php file without ANY dependency, but this is something I have to think over again. Maintenance will be a nightmare :-)

Next FOSS project I will work on is `Tone Audio Player`, a fully cross platform (Linux, Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, WASM) audio player app, that fully supports background playback without stuttering. But C# / Avalonia UI is just not there yet, I'm currently switching to flutter.

[1]: https://github.com/sandreas/m4b-tool [2]: https://github.com/sandreas/tone

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

#642

Post by ibestvina » Wed, Dec 13, 2023, 7:54 PM UTC

I always send myself messages as bookmarks, notrs, and general "here's an idea I might want to come back to later". It's an awful system when it comes to discoverability (I do it in Messenger so search is... bad), but I still do it as it's the most convinient option at the moment when I need to store that something somewhere.

So I built a simple Telegram bot which automatically stores anything I send as a text embedding into a vector database, and allows me to search over it in that same chat (same process that powers the AI Q&A assistants these days).

If I post a link, it automatically scrapes it and stores text as chunks for better search, extracts text from youtube videos (still wip), turns images into text with the visual models, etc.

One thing I'm unhappy about is not being able to easily edit any notes I search for later, but it's miles ahead of my previous "system". Hopefully I can open source this when I clean it up - if anyone is interested, let me know.

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

#643

Post by jftuga » Wed, Dec 13, 2023, 7:57 PM UTC

These are all CLI...

https://github.com/jftuga/less-Windows - [not really mine, but I just help maintain the port] - GNU less compiled for Windows 10 & 11. Stand-alone version with no dependencies.

https://github.com/jftuga/gofwd - A cross-platform TCP port forwarder with Duo 2FA and Geo-IP integration

https://github.com/jftuga/spotprice - Quickly get AWS spot instance pricing - a bit easier to use than the aws cli; is also faster and has more features

https://github.com/jftuga/tcpscan - A standalone, fast, simple, multi-threaded cross-platform IPv4 TCP port scanner

https://github.com/jftuga/ipinfo - Return IP address info including geographic location and distance when given IP address, email address, host name or URL

https://github.com/jftuga/photo_id_resizer - Resize photo ID images using face recognition technology

https://github.com/jftuga/chars - Determine the end-of-line format, tabs, bom, and nul characters

Here is a fairly new Firefox extension that I created...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/foxcolorbox/ - allows you to change and customize browser Window colors. When you open a new window, it will have a distinct color. You can also change colors by clicking on the extension icon.

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

#644

Post by Trixter » Wed, Dec 13, 2023, 7:57 PM UTC

A task timer that helps me stay on task trying to get multiple things done at once in my free time; highly configurable and controllable. I've always wanted to turn it into an Android app, but it's written in a dead language for a dead platform because that's where my skills ended, and I wouldn't know where to start.

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

#645

Post by johny115 » Wed, Dec 13, 2023, 8:16 PM UTC

mgirkins wrote: post #418

johny115 wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks interesting but with paywalled trial, you might as well say on homepage "we don't want anyone to use this app, go away".

I've been testing it out recently and it's been quite successful but I am about to change that to a soft paywall. I'm thinking 7 days with an occasional nagging paywall and then you get an extra 30 days free if you add credit card details. What do you think?

Ah, I didn't see this "Skip and try free for 7 days only".

Ahh the classic SaaS founder marketing :), putting forward product experience negatives and hiding the product positives. I was kind of annoyed because there was promise of "Try it free" on homepage and then it required me to input my credit card.

I wouldn't buy even the next revolutionary ChatGPT without trying it a first so I just closed it and commented here. And as a general rule I don't give anyone my credit card unless I plan to buy it, that's just such a dark pattern. I am a Marketer, not a Product guy, but still, big nope on this. If my intent is to try, don't push me into buying with underhanded tactics (aka, let's hope the guy forgets he's in trial and gets charged at least for a month before he remembers to cancel it). This just doesn't match the stage in the journey at all.

Basically I was checking it out on laptop and I didn't see the option to continue without inputting credit card, either because it was in the bottom or because of the nearly invisible color.

Yea, I just wouldn't do this at all. Remove credit card requirement completely, you're in a highly mature market with a todo list app. There's nothing special about another to-do app, in mature enviroment, you should encourage users to try your app fast. If it was me, id remove the homepage video and embed a demo of the live app there. Then you can keep asking for credit card.

Or like you said, start without the extra step of credit card altogether, then give option to add it for another 30 days, although, i am not sure if this isnt overcomplicated for no reason. Might as well just give 14 days without credit card and then ask for payment.

Personally I think best case is what todoist does, free "crippled" version with max 5 projects, and you need to pay for unlimited. You can use it free, but its annyoing, there are also more limits, and you basically get going with the tool and only get to face the question of payment when youre starting to depend on it, at that point youre like whatever, i need to solve something here so, buy. In your case you could have 2-3 root items for free, and want more? pay.

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

#646

Post by fuzztester » Wed, Dec 13, 2023, 8:21 PM UTC

OP here.

Wow, this is cool. I never thought that this Ask HN of mine would result in so many replies by people talking about the apps they have created. It was fun and inspiring reading many of them, so far, after I checked back on the post today evening. I was quite surprised.

Anyway, it only goes to show that there is a lot of hidden innovation happening out there in the world. Great to know.

I'll now have to spend a bit or byte :) of time over several days at least, ha ha, checking out more of the comments, and the apps mentioned, for those that have links.

Nice way to spend some of the year-end partial down time :)

So once again, thanks, guys, for talking about what you built.

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

#647

Post by zak905 » Wed, Dec 13, 2023, 8:40 PM UTC

I wrote a simple Kubernetes operator for renewing AWS container registry (ECR) credentials in several namespaces. The credentials expire every 12h, and the Kubernetes secret for pulling the images from ECR need to be renewed whenever a workload is to be created/updated. The operator takes care of renewing the Kubernetes secret every 12h in all the configured namespaces: https://github.com/zak905/kube-ecr-secrets-operator

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

#648

Post by sanjayparekh » Wed, Dec 13, 2023, 8:42 PM UTC

My co-founder and I launched https://www.togetherletters.com a few years ago because we never felt like we saw updates from friends on social media. We now use TogetherLetters for our own groups and see updates from them, knowing the updates will never be on the web. In the last few months (with no marketing from us), usage has taken off. We're starting to spend more time on improving it and figuring out what all these new users want/need.

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

#649

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 » Wed, Dec 13, 2023, 8:44 PM UTC

Too many to list. 100% command line. All are under 1 MB as static binaries. All of them work with each other and other "apps" via pipes, tmux buffers, fifo and regular files.

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

#650

Post by baccredited » Wed, Dec 13, 2023, 8:55 PM UTC

web007 wrote: post #586

baccredited wrote: post #569

"pw" a simple perl script that prints a random password. default length is 16 chars but if I do "pw 8" it will return an 8 char password I use it all the time, at least a few times a week. I wrote it because the secure passwords generated by iOS and various password managers are overkill for most purposes and extremely hard to type out by hand to an airgapped destination

Heh... I have several variants on this. My most-recent version is basically the diametric opposite of yours, make the least-readable passwords possible. https://github.com/007/dotfiles/blob/439ba7ff1d1f6dc01c4b792...

Love it! I like the bash implementation for bare minimum on the dependencies