What kind of tools are you currently using, missing or think can be improved?
Some examples:
- timestamp to date converter (e.g. https://magictools.dev)
- input tools (e.g. https://www.google.com/inputtools/)
- text comparison tools (e.g. https://text-compare.com/)
I get an issue in Jira "enable AWS feature for project X".
I search for AWS and Terraform documentation on those subjects.
I edit code on a feature branch named for the Jira issue.
I save links and notes into my Emacs org-roam knowledge base.
I test the new feature.
I submit a PR.
I edit documentation to support the new feature.
I add to the architectural decisions for the team and the project.
I close the Jira ticket.
Why? The more data the better. Being able to search for "AWS S3 policies" and get information from all the bits my brain "touched" to implement something. This is also something that might help those team members who are less likely to correctly document or record their work.
Now imagine that, but for a team. This is a half-finished idea, born mostly from a desire to link my Firefox bookmarks' tags and the tags in my org-roam knowledgebase.
- Finding out what a linux command line tool's flag does without having to CTRL+F through multiple matches in the manfile (https://explainshell.com/)
- Test and visualize JS regex (https://regexr.com/)
- Render PlantUML class or sequence diagrams (https://www.planttext.com/)
- Unicode code converter (https://r12a.github.io/app-conversion/)
- Unicode codepoint viewer (https://r12a.github.io/uniview/)
I love the simplicity of writing a program in mere minutes and distributing it with a single link.
Strange in a way, that companies spend so much effort restricting how we handle sensitive data, and then you copy and paste it into any website with an input box and no one seems to care. Fingers crossed and all that.
These sites are like camera phones when it comes to data. Everyone pretends they don't exist and can't copy data; that our security measures all work, just because.
Also, RGB to HEX. I'm always looking to convert one to the other, or choose similar colors to one I'm working with. The sites I use (at the top of Google) are always lacking in some ways.
I want a complete website archiver I can launch from a browser. Something like HTTRACK but works with modern sites full of embedded content.
i think my ideal browser would have a ui like tmux
actually if we could go back to using web technologies to build browsers (reminiscent of xul) maybe we should try to build browsers using wasm - then everyone under the sun can have their own contributions to make. xmonadic firefox, anyone?
If someone went back and forked or rewrote all those C, Perl and Python scripts into modern code then perhaps adoption of IPv6 would be slightly higher as network engineers would have more tools in their hands to manage and assign network configurations. Even better, if there was a public git repo that tracked all the older projects and the evolution to newer code in one place I think the adoption of usage would be really high.
I know this is now possible as I recently asked OpenAI Codex to do just this. I described the problem I had and asked it complete the best python library to solve it. It suggested a library I hadn't heard of but was just what I needed.
This also works with the older tool 'citeomatic' from Allen AI. You can describe the paper you want to read and it will give you a reading list. (Not exactly the intent of the tool, but it worked well while it was up to date).
I think there's room for both a medium form (a paragraph description) direct query tool and a chatbot like tool that tries to iteratively refine the search.
Image tool by google - Squoosh (https://squoosh.app/) RSS reader - Feedly Classic (looking for alternative that is similar, can be paid but no subscription) General News without the garbage - Winno (iOS app) (looking for web-based alternative) Regex learn - (https://regexlearn.com/) Icons8 - (icons8.com) Raindrop - (raindrop.io)
Things that are missing or can be improved: RSS readers & web browsers (specifically on iOS) Desktop email app for windows (waiting for spark to release)
If I ever need to translate
It would be nice to have something similar that worked as a website, and even could be sort of a cloud version of the A Capella app where you can collaborate on looping harmonies in realtime.
- rot13/rotN
- hex to ascii conversion
- multiple timers at the same time (one in 5 minutes, one in 7, one in 10, one in 15 for example)
- translation, mostly for japanese/english. I use google translate and deepl
- REPLs/playgrounds, when I want to test something in a programming language without installing it
- specific video conversion, usually to post a .mp4 on Twitter. This could and should be a shell script
- Google Sheets, for record keeping from my phone/computer or sometimes graphs
- Regex101.com
Can be improved:
I'd like something like Excel tables for Google Sheets.
I don't want email notifications spamming Github. I want a smarter feed of things I should care about and need to keep up with to do my work. PRs I probably need to review, Issues related to what I work on, etc... I haven't found a great way to do this, maybe others have ideas?
I also use Find & Replace for Text Editing[3] that also searches/replaces regex, but it's not the same as a quick fuzzy search.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approximate_string_matching
[2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fuzbal/lidjpicdkcgjdkgifmmpalkibjeppdof
[3] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/find-replace-for-text-edi/jajhdmnpiocpbpnlpejbgmpijgmoknnlTimestamp conversion? SwissKnife in VS code. Make a UUID? Command pallete has me covered!
The all-in-one online tools like CyberChef linked below are the most interesting, that way you don't have to have to dig around for different ones. But simple utils should not be hard to get to or need internet when VS code has more convenient options.
Online tools are great for casual users who don't have VS code or want it though.
Writers could also use it to direct new readers to their best content.
This is a blind spot of the native english speakers, but I need such thing often, usually trying to find one of the songs I heard some years ago.
Its really barebones right now, but planning to add more tools and polish it up a little bit.
* Infinite scroll
* Undo/redo
* Pasting images
* LaTeX math input
It's an online replacement for Photoshop fyi and comes pretty close.
Either I use hacker's keyboard or gboard, and with both I constantly misspell things and miss the keys. In online IDEs which do have some sort of autocomplete it tends to cover up half the screen. And with the other half is covered by the keyboard I can't see what I'm picking or writing or the context.
Something like an auto complete with an auto-zoom in and out when I type or choose something from the autocomplete would be nice.
Also some conveniences for copying and pasting lines of code around, not by using gestures (I'm clumsly...) but through a combination of keyboard and/or on-screen prompting.
This is a rather niche, since like I said I usually don't code on my phone. The only time I felt it was missing was when 2 years ago I did Advent of Code on my phone during commutes, and the only site that worked for me was ideone.com because their text entry is essentially just a simple no-frills textbox. So I didn't have autocomplete but I could bang up a reasonable solution in a reasonable time (I tried to get a semi-decent score).
2) I wish there was an easier way to view forks / branches of a given repo, across all popular sites. This would help finding forks with fixes of a repo which looks abandoned.
3) A site which aggregates book reviews from various sites, similar to RottenTomatoes but for novels.
Currently when I'm searching for book reviews when considering to buy or listen to a book, I first read (non-spoiler-y) reviews on Amazon, then on GoodReads, then google for reviews on various online outlets, then google for blogs, and maybe even search Youtube if I have the patience to listen.
There's https://bookmarks.reviews but it doesn't have too many reviews on it and of course doesn't include Amazon's ratings.
Something semi-automated would have been nice. For children's books it would also be nice if it included reviews from the CommonSenseMedia and Children's Book Council of Australia sites.
4) A way to browse all comments for a youtube video.
There's https://youtubextras.com but it doesn't seem to work for me.
Jump to a certain time and view comments from that time period.
Not just download them, browse them in the browser.
I know many people don't like youtube comments but I sometimes find them hilarious or even insightful (especially on popular dev-related videos), and I don't like youtube's interface for browsing them.
Something HN-like would have been nice, something that will figure out who is replying to whom in the flat second-level hierarchy and nest them. Possibly a browser add-on.
json / xml formatter / css minifier
text diff
online compilers
pastebins
- (an improvement) wormhole.app is nearly absolutely perfect but has trouble with very large files such as several gigabytes. Since it gives the link immediately I set a file to upload but it got stuck on the encryption stage, I only noticed when I checked it many hours later but I didn't get any indication it was stuck as opposed to just being slow. It probably uses an encryption algorithm that is not O(n) or something which is what encryption algorithms should use so that they can handle any file from 0 bytes to a few terabytes or something. It should only ever fail if the disk fails to read it for some reason, not due to any size constraint in the encryption algorithm on a desktop with 16 gigabytes of ram and lots of free disk space (in case it needs to make a local copy or something.) I think the encryption algorithm needs improvement so it handles large files better (I am basing this on where it gets stuck at the 'encrypting' stage for large files). improving this algorithm would let me use it for larger files or mailing myself a link, starting an upload before it's ready. I'm still going to keep using wormhole.app I think it's by far the easiest to use and best app - I just drag a file onto it and wait for it to complete then I know it's done. great app I use frequently for important things.
- (a new tool) I use a billionaire's laptop when I travel, something that isn't going to get stolen from me. sometimes I could use the power of a beefy server-class hardware for rendering a web app, for example my project management software isn't usable from this laptop. something where I could pay $50 per month for a remote desktop (that just runs chrome web apps nothing else), whenever I connect it swaps it into RAM and puts real power behind it, otherwise it swaps out to disk since I'm not using it. (I mention this requirement since web apps use enormous amount of state that they just load and keep locally - these can be swapped out to disk when a user isn't connected but when the user reconnects it needs to all go back into RAM quickly since the whole point of the service is to speed up web apps - the state shouldn't be discarded.) By the way clickup.com is the project management tool my laptop isn't really fast enough to load for example, I just use it from a desktop.
- (an improvement) clickup.com doesn't allow loading background images, this makes it unusable for my purposes since it is impossible to separate real products from vaporware. The CEO said he will fix it and they nearly have the required functionality, so hopefully this will just fix itself and let me use the tool. Besides this which makes it unusable it is really perfect. (If anyone works at clickup, vote on the issue to allow background pictures. it is as important as a cover is for a spy, I would say if I used clickup.com for anything actually important, lives would depend on it. the tool is unusable for me.)
- (a new tool) something like twitter but for KPI's. For example the only thing that matters to me in life is my happiness, it's been pegged at 10 for years, but sometimes people lie about how happy I am. (just as the CEO I mentioned would probably lie about whether any of his customers think his tool is unusable though I can't blame him.) So, it would be nice for me to be able to point them to the graph and say, well, that's not what the record shows. However, there is no record: there is noplace I can log in and put a 9.9 if my happiness ever drops from a 10 to a 9.9. I mean I guess I could track it on a Google document, I do that for some of my most important relationships, but I am thinking of something that will generate the graph for me as a permanent unalterable record - because that's what life is. Maybe one day I'll end up doing something mildly important, and if that ever happens it won't happen overnight, but if I ever make the history books, I'd like to be remembered as someone who lived happily and caused happiness around him along the way - my strategy at the moment is just to make sure I'm always 10/10 safe and happy, but sometimes (as with the stolen laptop example) it is hard for other people to know that. I'm not influenced by what other people think they want but from time to time I do like to share a record of reality. In the case of the Clickup CEO for example I would like to be able to show him that his tool has been unusable for me for 7 months or whatever (for example). The record doesn't lie. It's why I don't mind the fact that I can't use it on my travel laptop for example - it's unusable anyway. But who would believe it? It's such a small feature, Trello had it for years for example and many people say they are stuck with Trello due to this missing feature in Clickup. (Can you feel my anger??? It is certainly a very evocative question!)
Well, I really liked this question and it made me feel like someone is interested in providing good tools and functionality or improvements. that's a net win for everyone, so it makes me happy to see. (Specifically, the attitude of inquisitive helpfulness - great way to gather real requirements from real people, since otherwise we all risk spending all our time trisecting an angle (a famous unsolved problem in Greek geometry that wouldn't offer any benefits even if it were solved. We have protractors that are more than good enough for any real-world project.))