There was this small project long ago where you could organize all your desktop data in mindmap like 3d galaxies. It was really beautiful, but I can’t remember it’s name, nor have I found something similar again for modern operating systems.
Accurate progress bars and “remaining time” displays (yes, I know that this isn’t technically possible, but we’re wishing here).
I don’t want to see my computer/phone grind away for a few minutes yet still be at “0%”, then jump to “76%”, chug away some more, then abruptly finish a task. When something is going to take time, I wanna know if we’re talking “stare at the screen for a minute” kind of time or “find something else to do for a while” kind of time.
Like you said, as developers, there’s often nothing we can do about this. The state prior to something taking forever can be exactly the same as the state prior to it finishing quickly, so there’s no way for us to predict it.
The best we can do is give you a throbber.
That’s better than nothing! At least I know my computer isn’t frozen.
I just want to do a humble brag here and say that there are some programmers that care.
30 years ago when I used to make multimedia training software, I would run an installer with another script running that would time stamp completion of the different install steps.
I would average them out and using the equivalent of a player piano, “playback” the progress bar on the end-user install.
So instead of reporting that a certain percentage was done which didn’t actually represent the time, you got an extremely accurate progress bar that on almost every computer, went up at a very predictable rate.
It’s a grotesquely easy thing to do and I don’t know why it hasn’t become common practice.
A programming language that reduces bugs by using the Do What I Mean process, instead of Do What I Say.
Maybe a little more realistic: An IDE that asks you: Do you want X or Y? or I’ll do X unless you want Y…?
I believe chat gpt is able today to produce code for what you mean and not what you say.
A FOSS digital audio workstation that’s on par with Ableton
What are your thoughts on Ardour ? I don’t think it’s geared towards live performance though
I like that it exists, but haven’t gotten any good results with it personally. I could see it being useful if your needs are simple though, e.g., just setting up mics with instruments, and getting a decently-mixed multitrack recording together.
That said, I fully acknowledge that building something with the capabilities and sophistication of Ableton, or Logic, etc, is a gigantic undertaking, requiring huge amounts of work from a well-organized team. But an ‘all-in-one’ DAW solution might not even the right approach to take here, tbh. Maybe the FOSS model would work better for building a bunch of small modules that can be brought together somehow
Not FOSS, but Renoise is phenomenal and works on Linux, at least. Made by a very small company. Difficult to get used to if you’re not familiar with trackers, but not that difficult. It’s not Ableton Live, but it’s way up there in terms of professionalism and flexibility. And it’s very cheap, too.
Renoise is very fun to use, and sounds great too. My imaginary DAW would definitely come with a ‘tracker mode’ inspired by that
You know the CEO of Ableton encourages pirating Ableton right?
Sponsor Block for podcasts
Foss Adobe software like photoshop, and dont say gimp pls
Hear me out about GIMP - there’s this patch that re-arranges it to be as close to Photoshop as possible: https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP Of course it’s not 100% the same, but I think you should give it a try.
New project called Graphite is very ambitious, let’s see where they go with it. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFtZl_0rwO6o_LUoPN42_Zw
Otherwise you have Krita and MyPaint for painting.
A cross-platform status monitor for gamers to be able to tell what games their friends on other platforms are playing. PlayStation, XBox, PC, etc.
I looked into it and decided that it probably isnt really feasible because each vendor intentionally blocks this kind of thing. It would also be a nightmare to maintain, I am sure.
Discord already does this somewhat as long as you’re logged in to it on the console
Something that would let me remotely blow up the computers of people running cheats.
A templatable OCR app that maps areas or shapes to excel fields.
If you have a product tag with different serial numbers or product details and a standard layout it would be really useful to be able to scan for a tag shape, apply an overlay with each block of relevant data and then map that block to a cell address.
Take photo of product tag x100 OCR and edge find on product tag Select/draw areas Assign areas to spreadsheet cell or column. Apply and check with second photo. Confirm function and process next 97 images automatically.
Thought of it for work but would be great for food labels and nutrition information collation as well. All sorts of paper->digital stuff.
There have been attempts at this with store receipts, so you quickly scan your groceries into your budget or inventory app. That has been a difficult problem, in part because stores change receipts so much.
Something other than “Finder” for macOS
I haven’t tried it but maybe you can give it a try this (I have it saved in my check for later list lol).
Thanks I will have a look.
There’s
ls! But seriously, if anyone knows any “normal” file browsers for macOS then I’m all ears!I use pathfinder. It’s an improvement over finder, but still not great.
Bloodborne on PC
There aren’t a lot of software I wish existed, but there is one I’m helping to work on. Having a similar concept to the Hypothesis toolbar, it’s a fanmade combination of Pokémon Go and a toolbar. Imagine, instead of travelling the world and seeing Pokémon superimposed on the world, you’re travelling the internet and see Pokémon superimposed on random webpages.
An automated 3d modeling software with Ai implementation for dnd miniatures. Sort of hero forge combined with stable diffusion.
Voice to Text system for Linux.
After Sayboard for Android, it seems plausible to get a local voice recongnition system for PC too.
Something that can utilize a Shazam API or something similar and go through my entire music library (which is full of hundreds of tracks named “Track 1”, “Track 2”, etc.) and title them appropriately, ideally with correct metadata and album art. I would pay a lot for this.
MusicBrainz Picard is what you should try out.
Also, a song recognition feature was built into MusicBee for updating tags, but it never works as well as it could be.
Be sure to enable the extra cover art plugins in Picard.
Musicbrainz Picard has been amazing getting Plex straight for me. <3
The user scripts to import meta data from other sites rocks my socks. These are user created so search the internet for them.
