I’m bored and want to practice my Rust skills. I am the creator of open-tv. If you have any idea for a linux desktop app, even if it seems quite complex, I will take it.
An open-source Resilio Sync alternative (not syncthing) that centers around the folder represented by unique hash, without any device management
Idea 1
I’ve been looking for a journal/to-do/checklist app that isn’t completely thumb chewing stupid. I’ve yet to find anything as good, flexible and feature complete as what you’d get on PalmOS devices in the early 2000s.
I often use my journal for brainstorming and planning, and basically the best I can do is bulleted lists. I would like a checklist section that can do things like recurring tasks, one-off tasks, daily tasks, and persistent tasks. (Daily tasks: Feed cat. Each day it puts a task with that name in the Tasks window for you to check off. Persistent tasks: Fix the kitchen drawer. This same task remains in the Tasks window until it is checked off, and then stops appearing.) I would also like “take 5 loads of yard debris to the road 0/5” and be able to click to advance it to 1/5. Marry this with a journal app so that you can keep track of progress on stuff like fitness goals or whatever.
And please. Even if it is stored as human-readable markup, please. PLEASE. Let the user edit it in rich text mode. Too many of the “journal” apps out there require you to edit in markdown mode and then you can switch to a “view” mode to see what you’ve done. Also: Don’t be that guy whose app cannot be themed. I don’t want some light mode Gnome lookin’ bullshit in the middle of my dark mode Cinnamon.
Idea 2
Do a fully local fitness tracker. Apple/Google/Samsung health apps are there primarily to invade your privacy and no one should ever use them. I get that this one is more useful as a mobile app running on a device with MEMS sensors, possibly rigged to a smart watch with biometric sensors, and there is no such thing operational in the GNU/Linux world, but still it might get some use.
Idea 3
You asked for it: Woodworking CAD. This “seems quite complex.” The best workflow I can find is in FreeCAD, which is too complex and cumbersome for the job. It’s a general purpose engineering CAD system and it’s designed to work in abstract absolutes; you can’t think in terms of “put a mortise and tenon joint here” you have to think “create a sketch on this face and constrain a rectangle to this edge with these dimensions.” And then it doesn’t give you things like automatic cut schedules, materials lists, templates. FreeCAD is allegedly extensible, it is allegedly possible to create your own workbench to add more specific features. I even tried. There is no documentation, they didn’t write down what they were doing as they were doing it, so…I’m not sure why they bother at this point.
I’ve been interested in a CAD package that works the way a woodworker works. I’ve thought about trying to implement this in the Godot game engine, but even then the project strikes me as “monumental.”
Item1: I would love something along these lines. Honestly, I wish I could configure Thunderbird to be my journal and reference my to-do items programmatically from inside journal entries.
Similar to your wish for first class dark mode, I want light mode to also be first class. Too many apps lately have made dark mode default and the light mode is unusable.
I’m starting to think, especially with high contrast and high brightness flat panels, having working light and dark modes are an accessibility feature. Apparently folks with bad astigmatism or some other such struggle with light text on a dark background? Me I’m just very light sensitive and a modern LED backlit monitor showing large areas of white is physically uncomfortable for me to look at.
I am one of those gifted folks that enjoy astigmatism. I have tried dark mode and dark themes many times over the years and it just doesn’t work for me. The screenshots are gorgeous tho!
Voice assistant that allows to perform common tasks like setting up calendar events, sending emails, opening apps, etc. Bonus points for “connect to server abc” and the assistant would open the terminal and ssh to abc server.
