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Ask HN: Friends and I are hacking this weekend. What should we build?

by tehdik on 11/18/11, 3:54 AM with 20 comments

We have 4 coders and a designer. Any suggestions on something useful we can build in a weekend? We're thinking about using PhoneGap.

  • by callmeed on 11/18/11, 7:28 AM

    My wife keeps asking me to build an iOS app to keep inventory of her nail polish collection.

    If you build it then I won't have to.

  • by anujkk on 11/18/11, 6:28 PM

    I've been searching these for past one month or so but I failed to find anything that can be used without modification.

    1. Hacker News Clone in PHP that can be easily integrated with wordpress/buddypress through a plugin.

    2. Good event management plugin for wordpress/buddypress

    Apart from that I have some other ideas too:

    1. Draw&Share Mobile App - let users draw freehand drawing using touch screen and share it with friends(on facebook, mms, etc)

    2. Collaborative Whiteboard Web App - A simple whiteboard(freehand drawing + image/text/video/audio embedd) + Chat(text/audio/video)

    3. UI Library that uses HTML 5 canvas instead of normal html/css/js controls.

  • by jodoherty on 11/22/11, 1:28 AM

    Personally, I'd like a DJVU and PDF viewier that lets you highlight regions of pages and create hyperlinks to other pages in the same document. It should also have a history feature that gives you back/forward functionality like a web browser, and the focus should be on making it easy to read or refer to books and documents that require a lot of jumping around.

    I'd especially like one that suggests hyperlinks for documents based off of what users typically make hyperlinks for or based off of some kind of algorithm with heuristics built on content and formatting conventions, because even though just being able to create your own hyperlinks would be handy for studying and reviewing, having them appear magically would be a killer feature.

    However, that'd probably be too hard for a single weekend. For one thing, it'd still have to be a good PDF viewer, which means nice features like being able to custom crop/zoom pages to hide margins in documents with lots of extra white space, and it'd have to perform well with the large, complex kind of documents that people would want to add hyperlinks to.

    It also lacks long term viability due to the slow rise of eBooks with hyperlinked content on delivery platforms like the Kindle.

  • by Jun8 on 11/18/11, 4:47 AM

    How about doing a rule-based control app, that would let the user enter rules (either using a simple GUI with icons) or as a script for certain actions, e.g. IF (my home WiFi is detected, i.e. I'm at home) THEN (turn off bluetooth) AND (switch to using WiFi).

  • by ilconsigliere on 11/18/11, 8:04 AM

    How about a simple app that: 1) prompts for a word 2) returns X number of definitions (fetched from somewhere?) in a cleanly formatted manner 3) stores these definitions under your account history in a sort-able list (chronologically, part-of-speech, etc.)

    Basically, a definition-fetching app that stores the definitions in a clean and aesthetic manner.

    I tried making this as my first web app using the Google Dictionary API, but they disabled it just as I had something going in Flask. I keep trying to get back to making it but I've got so much to learn. Maybe I should just...... FIND A WAY. OR MAKE ONE???

    I'd use it everyday, especially if it was a browser addon :)

  • by thetabyte on 11/18/11, 5:06 AM

    A note taking application. I'm not kidding. I've never been happy with one. I don't need hackable like Gina Trapini's frankly amazing todo.txt. I don't need a huge platform like Evernote. I need something that is stream-of-consciousness. I post a small reminder to myself, and I can simply view this stream as a stream of my thoughts and reminders. It should be dead simple to note. It shouldn't ask for options, tags, or anything else. I should spend less than 3 seconds doing anything other than typing the note. I've never found any product which allows me to do this easily.

    (P.S. My preferred platform is Android, but I'd love to see someone attempt this on anything!)

  • by jnorthrop on 11/18/11, 8:05 PM

    If any, or all, of you are fitness nerds feel free to take this idea (http://jnorthrop.tumblr.com/post/12532204999/take-my-idea-me...).

    Briefly, it's a unique spin on tracking workout progress. I'm not sure how well I explain it in my post but, most of the ground work is done already so an MVP can probably be built in a weekend.

  • by johnl on 11/22/11, 2:32 AM

    How about a display ad presenter that a user places at the bottom of their blog or their posterous. It doesn't pop up or jump around but needs to be dragged up as if you are resizing your window in order to view the ad. The ads would compete against magazine ads, not Google ads. This would be a proof of concept program.

  • by sidcool on 11/18/11, 4:34 AM

    I suggest building an API which extracts results from Google and WolframAlpha, depending upon whether it's a computation being demanded or an answer.

  • by Mankhool on 11/18/11, 11:13 PM

    Synthesize gigwalk and wikileaks into a 100% anonymous marketplace for buying and selling of information based on geo location.

  • by itmag on 11/19/11, 11:27 AM

  • by freemarketteddy on 11/18/11, 4:32 AM

    If you guys decide to hack next weekend I can join in as an iOS dev as I am visiting the valley for a two week vacation...:)