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Ask HN: What “missing” technical solution(s) do you wish existed?

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Re: Ask HN: What “missing” technical solution(s) do you wish existed?

#21

Post by jmkni »

andars wrote: post #20
jmkni wrote: post #7

I want to slot my phone into a dock connected to three high resolution monitors and a keyboard/mouse and be able to do development work. Essentially, when it's in my hand it's in Phone Mode, when it's in the dock it's in Desktop PC mode. We are getting there with tablets. You can do this with the Surface for example thanks to Display Link technology. I just want the device to be phone sized , around 5.5" or so with a…

I don't understand. If you already are planning on using it with 3 monitors, what is the advantage of making it so portable? Why not just leave a slightly larger device where the monitors are and use the small device as storage / boot disk?

I guess.

I just like the idea that, if I am contracting in a couple of different places, have one of these setups in each one, rock up with my phone and boom!

Re: Ask HN: What “missing” technical solution(s) do you wish existed?

#22

Post by Maken »

jmkni wrote: post #7

I want to slot my phone into a dock connected to three high resolution monitors and a keyboard/mouse and be able to do development work. Essentially, when it's in my hand it's in Phone Mode, when it's in the dock it's in Desktop PC mode. We are getting there with tablets. You can do this with the Surface for example thanks to Display Link technology. I just want the device to be phone sized , around 5.5" or so with a…

So, you want Ubuntu convergence?

Re: Ask HN: What “missing” technical solution(s) do you wish existed?

#23

Post by IvanK_net »

I wish that webcams on laptops had open-source hardware and also a hardware switch, which connects and disconnects the webcam from the laptop (and thanks to open source hardware you can be sure, that the switch has no "back-door"). Turining that switch off and on would be much easier than putting the duct tape off and on all the time.

Similar hardware switch would be useful for cameras and microphones in smartphones. You can never be sure, what your iOS, or Windows Phone, or some modified Android OS is actualy doing.

Re: Ask HN: What “missing” technical solution(s) do you wish existed?

#24

Post by ranger207 »

jmkni wrote: post #7

I want to slot my phone into a dock connected to three high resolution monitors and a keyboard/mouse and be able to do development work. Essentially, when it's in my hand it's in Phone Mode, when it's in the dock it's in Desktop PC mode. We are getting there with tablets. You can do this with the Surface for example thanks to Display Link technology. I just want the device to be phone sized , around 5.5" or so with a…

Do you mean like Windows Continuum? It is only ARM, but I've heard rumors of an x86 Surface Phone sometime next year.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/Continuum

Re: Ask HN: What “missing” technical solution(s) do you wish existed?

#25

Post by thexa4 »

macca321 wrote: post #11
thexa4 wrote: post #8

A solution for game assets building. Ideally it would be possible to build all assets (maps, models, textures, binaries) in a game from source files to the format that's distributed to people. Unfortunately due to the build times for certain things like maps it's not feasible to rebuild everything before every release. Combined with the fact that the files are relatively large means that we can't store everything in…

Could you set this up using gulp?

Yes, the problem is that due to the size most of it lives in different repositories so it's hard to know what version you're supposed to build and when something you depend on changes.

Re: Ask HN: What “missing” technical solution(s) do you wish existed?

#26

Post by jtmarmon »

haskell on rails. the amazing static typing, binary compilation, etc of haskell, with a large ecosystem and monolith framework (like rails) behind it. haskell's community's focus on challenging, technical, scientific or mathematical problems has left normal web developers plainly not using it. but as our rails codebase has grown, it's hard to identify refactoring issues outside of obessive and overlapping unit tests.

i think Java actually comes closest to what I want here but unfortunately it's pretty hard to get past all the cruft the ecosystem has accrued over the years, plus it's java and marketing that as a company/developer sucks. also java is missing some expressiveness of haskells TS

Re: Ask HN: What “missing” technical solution(s) do you wish existed?

#28

Post by viewer5 »

I have a really bad memory, but the part that affects me most is inability to remember conversations, even fairly recent ones (like the day before). Just zero recall of it ever happening. I'd love a way to quickly and unobtrusively log 'talked with Able and Baker about X Y and Z at such and such time and place'. Right now all I can think of is typing it into my phone or writing in a notepad.

But having such a solution, that I could review to improve recall, or search if necessary, would be lovely. Something quick and unobtrusive.

Re: Ask HN: What “missing” technical solution(s) do you wish existed?

#29

Post by lj3 »

jmkni wrote: post #7

I want to slot my phone into a dock connected to three high resolution monitors and a keyboard/mouse and be able to do development work. Essentially, when it's in my hand it's in Phone Mode, when it's in the dock it's in Desktop PC mode. We are getting there with tablets. You can do this with the Surface for example thanks to Display Link technology. I just want the device to be phone sized , around 5.5" or so with a…

Does the development environment have to be housed entirely on the phone itself? I ask because phones are too underpowered for most dev work. But, cloud technology is getting to the point where you can play AAA video games remotely with low latency using a modest computer as a client.

To extend on what you have, I think it would be really cool to have a phone app that brings up a remotely-hosted triple monitor dev environment when it's docked. The actual dev server could be anywhere and all you would need to access it, both at home and at work, is the phone. Kind of like a visual tmux.

edited: removed "which is why the many attempts at making desktop docks for phones have failed". There are many reasons they have failed, but not catering to devs probably isn't one of them. :)

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