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Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?

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Re: Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?

#721
post #73

Soundslice ( http://www.soundslice.com/ ) -- animated guitar tabs / sheet music. Demo: http://www.soundslice.com/tabs/5680/bohemian-rhapsody-for-so... It's cool because: * The state of the art in guitar tabs is horrible ASCII crap (example: http://tabs.ultimate-guitar.com/e/eagles/hotel_california_ta... ). Soundslice is a 1000x improvement. * It solves a key problem for musicians, which is: when you're learning a new…

It's excellent! I'm so going to use this site. Is there a way to see the lyrics at the same time ?

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?

#722
post #4

A real-time web interface for remotely scripting Android devices using TypeScript. It is cool because Android is great and TypeScript is great.

I keep thinking javascript in android apps is a great idea but I can never get it to work in a way that simplifies development. Good luck! I hope you can figure it out.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?

#723
I am working on a food discovery app that works something like Waze. Users post where they get their favorite foods, either groceries or restaurants. This data is aggregated and used in the search tool that lets users search nearby, popular and in season. I haven't gotten it online yet but I have it running locally. Its important because there is no food information online. Every online food ordering website is closed off, and finding great food still requires people to ask around. This could open up a whole new market for small food producers who are producing great stuff but can't get awareness.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?

#724
a MUD (multiplayer text-based RPG) written in Ruby.

It's cool because MUDs are awesome. But I'm doing this in Ruby because it's a language I'm somewhat familiar with but I don't really consider myself an expert on (as opposed to PHP and Javascript, both on which I do consider myself to be an expert). I figured that building a Ruby project from scratch would be the best way to learn the language. So far, so good.

Thoughts: - No framework yet. Decided to just build it and see what happens. I'm not trying to learn Rails -- I'm trying to learn Ruby. They're not quite the same, obviously. - It's harder than I thought. It took quite some time for me to figure out how to mix together sockets and threads to keep track of multiple players - It's more fun than I thought. I've used Ruby in the past but have never really been impressed. (I think that's mostly Rails.) But this project is full of far more epic wins than my usual ideas. - Ruby probably isn't the best language to do a MUD in. I initially started with C and I got pretty far, but I decided I wanted to learn a new language, not build a MUD in a language I already know. - The old school Merc/Diku muds out there are based on flat files. All data, such as character files and area files, are stored in a custom flat format. I'm using JSON for my test data, since it's pretty easy for Ruby to consume, but I'm thinking I may switch to a DB-based setup. But then again, the flat file thing is working just fine...

I guess I'll publish the source some day, when I get to the point where it's playable.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?

#725

This thread needs more hardware. I'm making bike lights. First a little story. I was late to class one day in March, pothole season. I was cruising in the drops, when I came up to a T intersection. A van pulls up, and stops at the stop sign. As I approach the intersection, I see a pothole, swerve to avoid the hole, and the van pulls forward. I have about 1 second before I hit the van, land with my back on the hood, s…

Hey I'm working on the same thing. Right now I only have two rear blinkers hooked up to an arduino and a couple of sensors but I'm slowly building and planning more functionality.

It's a bit sad the lack of attention the rear of the bike receives with current product marketing.

Let me know if you want to develop together (totally understand this is a solo project and you're much further ahead!)

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?

#726
post #489

I'm working on a credit card sized e-paper device. It has an Arduino, USB, Real Time Clock, and a battery, and fits in your wallet. Still doing hardware designs. Some potential applications: * Replace all the barcodes in your wallet (loyalty/membership) * Google Auth TOTP * QR Codes (links/BTC wallets) * Interactive nametag * e-book/text display * date/time display with wireless phone sync over BTLE * act as a USB de…

E paper is a pretty cool technology that's tough to adapt to use cases.

Have you thought about potentially replacing office or grocery store signage? Those displays typically need to be changed by hand daily,.monthly, or yearly and could benefit from auto or remote updates.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?

#727

Creating a non-intrusive task management application. For example, you mail what the guy has to do and add this mail in cc: in_15_days@maildo.me . When the task is finished, he responds to you and adds: finished@maildo.me in CC. You can set up options for a weekly overview of tasks with their current state. Still developing the system though, but if your interested just add your mail to this form https://docs.google.…

Followupthen.com recently added support for tasks, which is basically this, I think?

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?

#728
JamHive (http://beta.jamhive.com) -- a service for musicians to collaborate regardless of physical distance and time constraints.

Back Story

I love music and would love to do a jam session with old friends, but it is difficult to schedule a time or we live too far away (ie: SF & Amsterdam & Tokyo).

Why Cool

* Musicians work together on a single jam (up to 5 instrument/vocal tracks)

* Record directly into browser or upload a pre-recorded audio file

* Basic editing and filtering of sound waves

And I am looking for feedback & advise!

* @Musicians, how is the recording & editing experience?

* @Engineers, currently, this is built with RoR, Bootstrap, Heroku, AWS and a huge mishmash of the Web Audio API - how can I make this scale better for smartphone, tablets, more browsers (currently only Chrome and Firefox)?

* @Engineers, advice on improving (speed & security) data upload / download

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