Take my app ideas
austinhenley.com
austinhenley.com
(I’m the founder of a company, Makerpad[*], that teaches people no-code)
Glide[1] - lets you create apps from a google sheet. Set up the template connected to your data and as it updates, your app will too.
Stacker[2] - build web-apps without code. Supports Airtable and most recently, Sheets.
Softr[3] - similar for websites but using Airtable as the data source. I think Sheets support will come soon.
Sheets2Site [4] - website builder with google sheets.
For GoogleDocs you can use parameters in the doc that change using something like Zapier (disclaimer: they acquired my company last year). I haven’t explored it the other way around eg. Data into a google doc updating something elsewhere.
[0] https://www.makerpad.co/ [1] https://www.glideapps.com/ [2] https://www.stackerhq.com/ [3] https://www.softr.io/ [4] https://www.sheet2site.com/
- Neighbor wrath saver: Constantly listen for shower and other bathroom noises and shut off any alarms if the user is deemed to be inside the bathroom and unable to reach the phone.
- Maps optimizer: Constantly listen to the accelerometer and if you determine the pattern to be the person running and there is a Facebook or Google calendar event starting within 30 minutes, automatically start navigating to it. If there are multiple simultaneous events in the calendar, try to determine which one the user is running towards and help the user reach that particular event. But also listen to the microphone and stop navigation if the user yells "shut up". Increase the font size and button size as well if the user is trying to operate phone while running.
- Caltrain ticket optimizer: If your GPS location is approaching a Caltrain station and the train is due to arrive within 3 minutes such that you're worried about purchasing a ticket in time, automatically download the Caltrain app and purchase a ticket for you so you don't have to fiddle with the machine. Work with Caltrain Inc so that it can unpurchase the ticket if you don't actually board the train
- Laundry optimizer: Automatically listen for sounds of laundry machines starting and remind you in 35 minutes later if it's the sound of a washer starting, or 45 minutes later if it's the sound of a dryer starting
- Cooking optimizer: Use front camera to determine if the user's hand is full of flour, oil, egg and if so, enable voice control of the UI of sorts e.g. "scroll down slightly", "kill that popup", "don't lock screen for the next hour" etc.
- Use the phone as a bluetooth mouse using the flashlight, rear camera, and accelerometer to determine motion on the table.
...
They should use machine learning to learn how to not be annoying then. This is possible, it's just big companies have too much momentum to make useful products nowadays
> highly battery-draining
Having demand will will be motivation for better battery research.
- The WYSIWYG editor isn't as good as GDocs (or Word, or insert other popular apps)
- Collaborative authoring is a pain. GDocs has this built in, via accounts everyone already has.
The utility of ease of use/low-friction/lightweight-ness can't be overstated. Getting rid of even a small amount of friction from systems often pays itself back exponentially.
Some gems included:
- A guy and a sass-talking car fight crime together.
- Seven Samurai meets the Equalizer, but with american war criminals.
- Screwball comedy but with homages and tropes instead of sight gags and jokes, with an ensamble cast of has beens doing swan song performances.
When I hear about twitter clones, the pitches for platforms become the jokes we make about them:
- a way for old people to yell at each other.
- bully safari, where you can go to antagonize people without conseqences.
- a way for people to share pictures of their butts.
- Orwell's 'two minutes of hate'
- a fame simulator where robots flatter you
- a place for smart people to act stupid
- warcraft for passive aggression
These are mostly empty snark, but some of them can be funny, and they take us out of thinking that we should re-make something we have today with some minor augmentation, independent of the original context it was created, and start looking at what something genuinely new might be.
- Knight Rider
- Maybe "The Expendables"?
- No idea, but I feel like I want to watch it!
For instance:
Hilarity ensues when a mild-mannered suburban family adopts a troubled San Francisco homicide detective.
Clint Eastwood, John Lithgow, and Margaret Langrick star in?
Dirty Harry and The Hendersons
Or:
A retired English butler reminiscences about his time in service to a Lord’s estate while also trying to convince his fellow townsfolk that recently arrived aliens come in peace.
Keanu Reeves and Anthony Hopkins star in?
The Remains of the Day the Earth Stood Still.
Or:
The boss of a Los Angeles crime syndicate enlists the help of a top British Spy to help recover a stolen briefcase by going undercover at an exclusive high-stakes poker game.
Ving Rames, Daniel Craig, and Samuel L Jackson star in?
Casino Royale With Cheese
Dominic Toretto and his street racer friends go around making some ridiculous claims.
An FBI agent must enlist the help of a killer to catch a dangerous fiend, who's crime is shushing people on public transport.
An archaeologist/adventurer is hired to venture inside a proton to see what particles he can find.
You might enjoy Says You (public radio show). They do this category from time to time. Most recently 2 weeks ago, SY-2630, round 3, starts at ~20:30 in. :)
- a place to be wrong on the internet
- reddit, but with hope
- well.com/../actually
but finally,
- something to appreciate
Disputable. Many people have many ideas. Just the mass alone diminishes the general value of ideas.
> A poorly executed good idea can easily out perform a well executed bad idea.
Also disputable. For the evaluation, result matters most. And a bad idea which still solves a problem, is better than a good idea which just exists in its own isolated bubble, doing nothing worthful.
The tech-world is full of fancy oversmart ideas and their implementations. Yet many of them fail because neither a good idea, nor some half decent implementation alone have enough worth to survive.
That'd be something I've never seen. Any examples?
One of the maxims I adopted from a mentor was that good execution of a mediocre idea will beat poor execution of a great idea. So far, it's been true everywhere I look.
We're surrounded with decent execution of horrible ideas.
Meant with all due respect, but.. I think you've got it backwards? Great ideas have no innate value, they're easy to come up with.
Ideas are worthless on their own. Building them is what matters. This takes time and skill. Most people on a site like this have the skills to build on an app idea, but everyone has varying levels of time. So if I post an idea here, there's a good chance someone with more time than me will read it, and might steal it. If I sit on the idea until I eventually get around to executing it, then the chance of someone beating me to market is much lower.
The worst thing that could happen is that I never build it, and no one else does either, so the world misses out. That's personally less of a problem for me than watching someone steal my idea.
I think describing the process of telling someone a good idea, and having them act on it, as "stealing" your idea is not necessarily a healthy way of thinking about ideas.
More valuable would be prescient knowledge of social trends, a team that's really good at execution, or knowledge of some existing pain point that still doesn't have a solution.
Haha. Someone had to try looking at the git history, figured I had nothing better to do
If more replies are added to the conversation, one can rebuild the ffmpeg audio file locally. This could be awesome for blind people, and a big win for accessibility.
Please note I'm not talking about text-to-speech systems, I'm talking about the autors speaking in specially crafted tweets (that results in audio files saved in some server and them some app parsing them as a single file).
The 3rd one already exists.
Windows can track the Clipboard history, at the Clipboard settings, just enable it and start using the "Windows logo key + V" key combo to open the clipboard context menu and select any of the latest copied items (including images).
The Samsung keyboard at Android also does this as well.
Maybe there's something like this for Linux and Apple equipment, I don't know.
The 4rth one I tried using the Web Archive to retrieve it, but it wasn't available. haha.
The 5th one exists as an app called Chklsty[0]. What you're needing is checklists for repeated processes. It's not for single-use to-do lists.
--
They aren't asking for a generic clipboard manager (that are numerous) but one that can log only URLs. A more flexible implementation will be for the manager to include filter functionality for what it logs. Afaik none has this.
The faster we collectively realize this, the faster we'll be able to reign in the excesses of IP law.
lots of people are saying this here, I agree, pretty much, almost all the time, because almost all ideas are ideas that people have had. Especially when they are product ideas.
But on the other hand, whenever I hear this ideas are worthless, I do get a reflexive kick in my gut against conventional bullshit that everyone has agreed to believe in to fight against the old fashioned bullshit people used to believe, which was that ideas were valuable in themselves. And when I get that little reflexive kick in my gut I think, amazingly these people have never heard about pagerank.
I mean sure, without a good execution they wouldn't have anything, but the idea was definitely worth quite a bit more than "hey what if we made Yahoo, but improved the execution a bit?"
The hidden cost of execution is preparedness.
I will admit that I'm using almost exclusively external tools and had I wrangled the X library myself, this would have taken longer. And while it's technically a working product, it's not exactly polished. But it proves my point. Not a difficult project
However, you cannot claim that you learned bash scripting within those 5 minutes. Or that you knew in seconds that these were the libraries to use for that little but valuable script.
All costs considered, time to learn what to do is included. So, it was far more than 5 minutes, though your execution was less than that.
This topic is part of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_development_life_cycle.
It could happen that my 15-year tinkering effects in great value delivered.
My point is that time devoted to learning something is not free; you must consider it a business cost.
Regardless of time exposed to the topic at hand, not necessarily a lot of time invested* into something results in a great deal of value to be delivered. You could optimize that time with ultra-learning techniques[1].
The correlation of time exposed to a topic doesn't result in the causation of how much should I charge a customer.
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[0]: https://www.ivanmontilla.com/blog/does-professional-experien...
[1]: https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/ultralearning/
EDIT: * Improved clarity by adding a word.
I agree that the time spent to find the libraries and their documentation should be factored in, so I'd like to note that that part of the process took ... 3 ddg searches (so +a few mins).
?where does parcellite store clipboard data -> https://www.mankier.com/1/parcellite -> `clipboard -c`
?regex for url -> https://gist.github.com/securibee/f15f8c7aaa0593cc32fc30f585...
?get notified when something has been copied to clipboard linux -> https://askubuntu.com/questions/1167026/detect-clipboard-cop... -> https://github.com/cdown/clipnotify -> `while clipnotify;do`
:)
Using your previous knowledge inventory is not a direct cost of resource usage, but you'd not have been able to craft that script if you had not known about the tools.
[1] https://austinhenley.com/blog/thisprojectwillonlytake.html
https://unvalidated-ideas.vadosware.io
Though my reasoning is more that I know I’ll never get to executing on all the ideas I have so I hope someone else can validate and execute
Kind of hard because ideas are somewhat worthless without execution!
- premium tier (released 3 days early, higher Idea tier/grade average)
- advertising blurb next to the tl;dr
Will probably do one or the other — that’s all I can think of right now!
I mentioned this in the first issue as well!
I always maintain that ideas can be valuable in themselves, against the repeated VC argument that 'ideas are worthless', but this is an example where the VCs are right.
Some people are so full of themselves that they don't even realize how crass they might come across.
An appropriately ironic comment, given that you just arrogantly belittled someone while also accusing them of narcissism, despite the author plainly writing that they don't claim any of the ideas are good. Next time RTFA before spouting inflammatory nonsense.
"I'd rather give my ideas away than let them go to waste. Who knows if they are even good? The hard part is the execution anyway."
So in this case, RTFA becomes really important and not some "silly chant." Because instead of reacting to what they actually wrote, you've instead concocted a story about this person in your head, and then attempted to belittle them for it.
I challenge you to quote any line from the article where the author says anything remotely "full of themselves" or "crass." You won't be able to do it, because it doesn't exist, and you're just being shamefully inflammatory for no reason.
I’ve never seen an actual good biz idea that someone was willing to share online
These are app ideas. You don't have to monetize everything, some things can just be for fun / rep / learning / sharing / etc.
“Why I prefer making useless stuff” https://austinhenley.com/blog/makinguselessstuff.html
In the meantime, I’m using Apple Notes and copying the result into a Markdown file whenever it gets long enough to start noticeably confusing the Notes.app scroll bar (about once a month).
The list is not very good but if we all post one of those mythical "easy to come by" good ideas that everyone is having simultaneously.... (hah)
My idea would be "take my ideas app" an app where people can share their startup ideas. Nice categories, each topic is an idea. Replies are either 1) text 2) a link to a similar service 3) a link to a product or service useful for implementation of the idea with a text explaining how 4) useful contact details that can be accessed if you attempt to build the idea.