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What Isn't There an App For?
An anonymous reader writes: "There's an app for that!" It's been both an educational comment and a joke for years, now. There are so many small, single-purpose pieces of software available that it's impossible to keep track of everything apps can do. Indeed, when I'm looking for more usefulness out of my phone, I tend to browse the various app stores for interesting software, trying to figure out what more the phone can do for me. But a recent article turns that around and asks: for what tasks does the software have yet to be written? Though most of the article itself doesn't focus on that subject, it got me thinking about apps I'd like to see. (Which was harder than I expected.) I'd like an app that'd help me diagnose bad noises my car makes. I'd like one that can aggregate all my communication channels into one screen. I'd like one that can easily pick up program states from one PC — like an IDE session — and carry them to another PC. What apps are you still waiting for?
At least on the iOS platform part of the reason is that Apple does not approve some types of applications, mainly for political reasons.
There isn't an app for telling you what there isn't an app for. . .
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
I'd like a good non-skeuomorphic calculator like the xp powertoy calculator. And on os x I'd also like the old version of spotlight back that stays in a corner instead of demanding to be in front and more important than your work.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. But the percentage of discussion of apps was pretty low. Not zero. But low.
If the issue is just location, and not resources (needing to move to a machine w/ more memory, better CPUs for compiling), then you can just use remote desktop technology.
Of course, some IDEs also let you save the state of your project (what files are opened, how the windows are organized, etc), and if they save it to a file, you might be able to move that between systems, but you'd need the files laid out the same on disk so that it'd find everything again. If all of the files are in some version control system, it shouldn't be too difficult.
(I'm a Mac user, so can't comment on PC IDEs ... and I don't really use an 'IDE' per se. I use BBEdit, which is more a text editor with some IDE-like functionality)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Dashboard camera app that scans license plates and alerts when police ghost cars are immediately ahead or behind. Connects to a user-maintained database of known ghost car plates.
May not be legal?
they are made to collect your data for later liquidation by means of selling or exploiting them. While usage statistics (with opt in!) are ok, for app improvement and good, I don't think there is really an user respecting app for everything.
I'd like to be able to take a picture of a plant or mushroom and have it identified for me. Bonus points if it tells me if it is edible. Bonus Bonus points for preparation instructions and recipes.
as a mix of Old and new,
I never found a decent punch card reading and parsing App...
I'd like to see that too, unfortunately the walled gardens of the industry seem to make this impossible. For everybody wanting to have such an app, I'd suggest to only use non-walled-garden communications: app developers should be abled to develop compatible apps for certain services.
that decides the halting problem. :P
Over reliance on apps.
Case in point: a GPS app, because even experienced drivers are too afraid to get lost. Never mind if getting lost allows you to discover new places, and more importantly, makes you learn from the mistake. People these days are so risk averse, always expecting to get it right the first time.
There is an app to create an app that doesn't already exist... there must be. Err... surely? Hmm.
Seriously, try to find this for an iPad/iPhone that doesn't require a separate computer.
They're expensive paperweights for me.
At least there's an IDE on Android that has a compiler.
Like FireFox?
I just googled this, and it looks like Mozilla is working hard towards making this happen. Still, Apple isn't exactly open-source friendly on iOS from my perspective, (and I'm not an iOS user, so I am not exactly enlightened in this department).
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
I dreamt of the ultimate app when I was three in 1979. A flying ball of light that guides you to a lost thing when you ask it to. RFID tags do NOT solve this, so please don't. It should work at great distances and even if something isn't physically tagged.
I would like to see a reliable app that identifies a piece of music from various forms of user input such as lyrics; whistling, humming, or bad singing; or other fuzzy information. Google does a reasonable job with partial lyrics, but it good luck identifying instrumental pieces.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
I am sure there is more than one company working on this right now. The idea is quite simple. I want to get from A to B and would like to see all my options listed and sorted by speed and price. Including rental, flight, taxi, uber, train, car sharing, bus, own car, bike, walking, hovercraft, skateboard, and so on. And any combination of the above that would make sense. Optimized by weather forcast (less likely to bike, motorbike or walk), recorded walking speed, recorded bike speed, and options I can put in. For example a dislike for rental cars, lack of drivers licence and other.
This is simply a logical conclusion of Google Maps, navigational software and the modern smartphone. If I want to travel to point X, why doesn't it show me everything, how fast and how much it will cost me? Why do I have to manually check train and bus schedules (which are machine readable on the internet) and see if I want to walk to a different public transport station than the one nearest to me, if it offers a much better connecting and I am a fast walker. Or own a bike.
When you get in line at the supermarket, you press "start". When you finish checking out, you press "stop". The time you waited in line is uploaded to a database.
When you are at home, trying to decide which supermarket to visit, you can check "which supermarket near me has the shortest lines at this day/hour?" and thereby decide where to visit.
Some sort of statistical analysis would have to be done to filter out fake data inputted by store employees.
I'm not willing to wait an extra 10 minutes in line to save 50 cents on a quick shopping trip - my time is worth way more than that. But until now, there is no way of knowing how long you will wait (besides past experiences which generally do not form a statistically significant set). So stores have little incentive to compete by improving the wait time. If a critical mass of consumers used this app, that could change.
Maxima/Xcas/Octave functionality, only with an actually usable interface?
Ezekiel 23:20
One better: How about an app for picture recognition?
Snap, save, and sexy robot voice telling me, That's a seat and spring from a pre-1972 Delta.
http://xkcd.com/1425/
The idea of filling up my 'device' with a large number of nefarious, insecure, data-thieving, location stealing, mutually incompatible, crash causing, cross-selling little craplets that put me in touch directly, without choice to corporate hell, fills me with horror. What was wrong with the 'web' and 'choice'? Oh, I know, choice, although, in principle one of the tenets of capitalism is so annoying, much better to press the button on the craplet and get a Big Mac directly.
Actually, my mobile is normally switched off and in my kitchen drawer, anyway.
I had a friend who was very quiet but one hell of a programmer and made his own circuit boards for his programs. I pushed an Amiga digitizer for him on my BBS. It was freeware, unless he constructed the board himself.
He was always asking if anybody wanted a program they needed, I got a printer buffer that showed how much was left to print, this after I printed some 200+ pages (dot matrix) and no clue when it would end.
He was working on car sensors, one would plug in a serial cable to their computer and it would show defects or problems, as far as I know he only used his car for this. I've noticed that this is a commercial product now (not his).
Last I talked to him he wanted a 3D map of Mt. Rainier, and was at a loss of how to do it; not with contour maps, nor a 3D printer (not out then) but how to scan the Mountain itself, just a tad eccentric.
I'd be very interested to know what he's up to now.
So for him a mountain scanner :)
Linked to healthkit or whatever it is Android uses. Health data is of limited value if you ignore time of day.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
There isn't an app to automatically switch off a phone when driving is detected.
I think parents need to limit the functionality of mobile phones. Certain apps should have a daily time limit and a schedule. At least on iOS, this is not possible due to limitations imposed by Apple.
Not the noise, but there is Torque Pro and several others that will diagnose your car with a OBD 2 dongle that will show whatever the car is able to show.
So that should already help.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
That is, decent Computer Aided Translation and Optical Character Recognition software.
As for OCR, we don't even have that for Linux desktop (the closest is the ABBYY engine, but it's CLI-only, which precludes manual area markup.) The situation with CAT tools has recently improved on the Linux side, with Heartsome Suite released as GPL and CafeTran becoming mature.
I've researched this question since about 2012, for two or three years. I wanted to develop apps. What I discovered is that the only apps left that you could write would cost you more in time, opportunity cost, equipment, etc than you'd ever make. They're either too hard for one person to do alone, or they'd be such niche apps you wouldn't make enough money to pay for your time. (You'd make more money collecting scrap metal out of people's recycle bins than you would on the app.) So unless someone puts money into the app for some reason, there's no cost justification for writing it. A corporation would have to sponsor the app or something.
I wanted to write apps, so I got to the point I literally e-mailed people and asked what software they needed but didn't have. They couldn't really answer the question. They had everything they needed. The few ideas I got back were the kind of thing where if I wrote it, I'd lose money.
I'd like an application that does a good job of displaying signalling pathways.
A hypothetical country with a muslim, gay, black president.
AFAIK, USA is real, not hypothetical, and there are tons of games about this country.
...no, actually, I'll keep that one under my belt. It's actually rather good.
I mean, what is this shit, "Please do my homework for me by suggesting a phone app I can do to score higher and make a little cash into the bargain"?
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
As far as I know there's not an app for keeping all the other apps from harvesting your data.
Or alternately an obfuscation app for generating garbage data to apps to render the app data harvest useless.
Quite frankly, I don't care about small single-purpose apps. The UI on phones and tablets aren't designed to help us find one app among dozens. In most cases, you bump into limitations as soon as you start using it. In many cases, you'll use it a handful of times then never use it again.
If you are looking for anything that is even moderately sophisticated, chances are that no one has made an app for it. There will already be an app in many software categories, but they provide basic functionality at best. Consider what passes for word processors and spreadsheets, or even web browsers and email clients these days.
If you are looking for anything that doesn't lock your data into an unsupported proprietary file format that is hidden in some unfathomable directory on your device, or forces you to use a network service to access your data -- well, good luck. While there are usually options for content consumption, content creation is hit-and-miss.
There are a number of reasons for this, but the biggest one is profitability. Very few people want to make a cheap app that takes a lot of time to develop. A lot of people want to translate the sale of cheap apps into more profitable online services. So what we tend to end up with are a bunch of apps that go after the low hanging fruit and sound revolutionary, when in reality they are little more than toys that you could easily accomplish with a single generic application.
Most of the apps I make are based on something that I want. I make it largely for myself, and then it turns out other people want it, too. :-) ).
There are plenty of things that need to be done, at least on Android.
For instance:
A night vision preserving red/green screen mode app for astronomers and others who like to use phones in the dark (chainfire had one but last I checked it stopped working with Android 4.0; I made one that worked with some Galaxy phones, but it doesn't work with recent ones).
An ebook reader app aimed at serious scholarly text study that supports large corpora with fast indexed boolean search and automatic alternate spellings (I like to work with 17th century French texts
An astronomy app with fully expandable object databases and integration with sky survey photography.
And what kind of interface would that be? Even now with mouse and touch and keyboard and whatever other input devices, LaTeX is still one of the best tools for writing equations, and as much as I like it, that would be crappy on a phone or tablet.
An app that will check other apps to show you how insecure it is and what data it shares with ratings.
We know it's in your kitchen drawer. Don't worry.
"USA" -> Blade Runner
Futurist Traditionalism
...putting the goddamned phone down and driving / walking / paying attention?
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Since I read several years ago about a scientific application that can identify and count each an every penguin that comes waddling in front of the camera, I'm waiting for a visual bird-indentifying app for my feeding house.
Also an app to identify each an every bird that's singing in my neighborhood and counting even individuals of the same species.
The only ones to reply so far are overly cynical, probably from having stayed up all night gaming or hacking code and likely are on their 6th cup of coffee.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
My acquaintances are into herbal meds, homeopathy, and snake oil products. They say they help, but they don't know the first thing about conducting a true scientific study of any of these products. "But this herb made my sore throat go away!" Yeah, but you might have also been getting over a cold, plus the humidity rose 20 points at the same time. All these snake oil salesmen prey on the fact that we feel slightly better or worse due to random factors other than their product.
So what I want is an app that can track basic environmental phenomena over a period of months to look for more likely correlations for why I feel better or worse on a particular day. I'd like to track my physical environment (baro. pressure, temp, humidity, sunlight, pollen), my emotional environment (stress level, e.g.), and what I do that day (amount of exercise, outdoor vs indoor, boring tasks vs interesting activities).
We know these sorts of things affect us already (barometric pressure, e.g.) from studies that have been done. But they affect us all differently and in different combinations. It would be nice (and interesting) to unravel to some extent what factors affect me, and to prove to people that how they feel is more likely due to combinations of environmental factors, rather than some made-up illness that snake oil might cure.
An app that removes all this crap from your phone and prevent any later changes to it.
I use a phone as a phone and thinking of getting another phone for internet only. Combining the two doesn't really make sense to me.
"It's not unusual for my gf and I to get in a car, drive for an hour at random, and then let the satnav drive us back."
Try that in LA a couple of times.
You'll need no app anymore.
Ever.
There is no fonteditor app, at least not on Android. Nore is there any app for creating your own gesture input method. I haven't seen any app for fully remote controlling android and seeing a scaled down(?) version on my desktop. There is no svg editor for android that is as powerful as inkscape. I haven't seen any application for counting objects, in which you teach the application "here is an object, now count all like these". There is no "talking head" chat, in which you design your own 3D model of the kind of monster head you would like to have, and then through the camera the app maps motion vectors which makes your monstors' head move and talk. The claim is like saying that it is time to close down the patent office, because all inventions have already been done.
There are some apps available that I don't want as an app. For example, irealpro is available on android and iphone, but I want it on my computer. I don't WANT to carry around with me on a little device with crappy sound quality and that could be easily lost or broken. I want it on my desktop in my studio where it can be permanently integrated with my sound system and on a large screen with a keyboard and mouse so that I have a user interface that is actually usable.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
I wouldn't trust them if they're only on their 6th cup. When they get to their 4th pot, let's see what they can do.
I wrote one as a Grease Monkey script, but I've never seen it as an app. Of course I haven't lookeed - maybe there is an app. It sets display: none on any posts that are extremely long like the cleanmypc ones, any that mention a certain file used to map host names to IP addresses, and any users I blacklist.
90% of forums run on one of two or three popular forum scripts, so one app could work on most forums.
would require an air sampler.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
As a mobile developer and architect (primarily iOS now), I hate to say that there is much truth in that statement. In 2010, I started developing apps for both myself and corporate. The trend, which became very apparent in the early days, is that even if you have a great idea, you are up against several roadblocks. At the very least, an app/applet/program on a mobile device is supposed to do one thing and do it really well.
In the private, consumer world:
1) You have to set a price point that people will pay. That's typically either free, $0.99 or $1.99. And, it's why some developers people incorporate ads into their apps in the hopes of eeking out a living.
2) Then, you have to get it noticed. For some reason, insanely stupid or novel apps make it on the chart. The apps that provide utility never rank high so they become to find.
3) Then, you have have the copy-cats. They say copying is the finest form of flattery. Great - if it gets one a date with a really hot member of your preferred sexual preference. But, don't cut into my profits with that bullshit because you can't come up with an original idea of your own and then resell mine at a lower cost or give it away.
4) Lastly, there is the app lifecycle and planned obsolesce. You app has a limited lifetime. Any slowness during loading or awkwardness in its UI and it will, likely, meet the squiggly icon of doom rather quickly.
Platform of choice? Android and iOS.
The Commercial world is where the money is to be made. Large corporations have products they want to sell and marketing/sales folks who keep coming up with ways to get their products out there. They also have the money to fund development of limited purpose apps. Most still prefer to use web-based apps as well as they understand the web platform and how it can get their message across and it tends to be cheaper. Done with it? Just turn it off. Users aren't out any money. Typically, doing so is no harm no foul. Their platform of choice? iOS. Android is not making a dent in our industry (Pharma and Health) BECAUSE it is so open.
So, where does that leave us developers? Well, the market keeps evolving. First we had the older BREW and SYMBIAN phones (what a PITA). Then, we got smartphones followed by tablets. Now, through emerging tech, we have wearable devices. That will be the next market - finding the best ways to marry wearable tech with mobile, tablet and desktop technology to give the user something they find useful and affords the chance of making money. People might not like the ApplePhone or Pebble or whatever. But, it's coming.
Case in point - My youngest son, now 15, said he wanted an AppleWatch. Why? He finds reaching into his pocket to see the time (he doesn't walk around with it in his hand all the time, oblivious to the world around him as many teenagers do). Still, he wants something that does more than just tell the time (he's a competitive swimmer...not that the AppleWatch will help him there as it's not, supposedly, waterproof).
I still think a good online service providing utility via the web AND offering a useful web-service API is the way to go. I can build a mobile, tablet or tethered device to it when I am ready and think the market is ready and willing to pay for it.
"I'd like one that can aggregate all my communication channels into one screen."
BlackBerry OS 10 has had this feature since the new smartphone operating system and hardware launched in 2013. The application is called BlackBerry Hub and works flawlessly.
My sister is a physician (internist, not a dermatologist) and she wants and app that would allow her to take a picture of a patient's skin condition and suggest possible diagnoses. Probably something that would need to be crowdsourced or tied into Watson.
So far, the best interfaces/capabilities I have seen have been emulators of existing graphing calculators. But it should be possible to do much better on a device with a fully reconfigurable display/interface than simply emulating a much less capable device.
A simple application that can help with common car problems that doesn't need internet.
E.g. Car doesn't start: Does it turn over? Do the lights still work? Does it try to start? Did it die while driving? Bad starter/battery/spark/alternator/neutral switch/...
I put in a list of items I'm interested in as I go about my day. Toilet paper, floss, pork & beans, taters, batteries (AA), crème brûlée, washer for the faucet ...
While traveling around doing other stuff, this app barks that I am in the vicinity of Rao's Bakery and they have crème brûlée. On another day, I'm gassing up and "BARK!" they have pork & beans inside the store.
I could decline: 1.) Not now 2.) Not this store (and that store is blacklisted for that item).
I could blacklist any store. I hate Walmart.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
I'd like an app that'd help me diagnose bad noises my car makes
There are many. Most make use of an obd2 -> bluetooth dongle.
Y'en a pas su'l store right now. Tchequn devrion faire une. Ca halerait right bocoup de piasses pour se greiller des bounes hardes.
The most important thing we need is a FOSS Distributed Google Apps Palette.
I mean the whole thing.
Think the magnitude of KDE, Gnome and LibreOffice, together.
For mobile and web.
FOSS Docs (mobile app and web based collaborative editing)
FOSS Drive (mobile app and web based doc & file management)
FOSS+ & FOSS Hangouts (mobile app and web bases social networking and chat - preferably encrypted)
FOSS Picasa (images, tied in with the FOSS Social Network)
I'd even think about redoing DNS to be more abstract - some encryption-based domain registry scheme to become independant from the registrars. And, of course, a complete redo of this bizar, totally outdated and completely out-of-its-depth service called E-Mail. I'd argue, with a properly implemented, new E-Mail service social networks would become obsolete. ... No suprise actually, if you think what insane amouts of hassle go into setting up an email account - not to mention server - for a service that is more tha 40 years old and beyond insecure and, compared to Facebook, Google+, Hangouts and Whatscrap, totally unusable.
Seriously, mobile fragmentation and comoditisation has reached the same pre-PC level of the 80ies, that had Atari, Amiga, Apple, Sinclair and the likes had us deal with back then. Yet now we have the power to build a layer on top of that, that is entirely FOSS, encrypted, secure and uses its own independat protocols.
Now that would be a FOSS undertaking that would actually matter and make a difference.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
1) Facebook but with the posts in chronological order messenger built in.
2) A keyboard that's the same as the default, just with a row of number keys on top.
3) A video player that can reliably stream any video file that's on my Mac to my phone if I'm in wifi range.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
If someone can create an app that itself accurately determines whether any given app will terminate (or not) for any given input... I'll be more than impressed.
:-)
Other than that, I think every damn app possible has already been written.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
there should be an app which constantly reports statistics how much app information is transmitted to third parties. An other good app would be able to store of old versions of apps. My previously favorate note taking app penultimate recently got swallowed by evernote. The old version still allowed emailing the notes and keeping the notes private, now everything goes through the evernote servers. It was even no more possible to the old notes without going through the evernote servers.
This app would come with a feature that completely erases itself and any record that you even considered using it. This kicks in if you don't positively identify that you are still alive and coherent every 6 hours. The lawyers would make sure this feature is present.
Since you might be using this app in the wilderness, while you are foraging, there are some sister apps you might like; one that estimates if you can jump that ravine, and another that tells you if there are enough handholds on that cliff face for climbing...
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
There is no easy to use, one click install solution for syncing all your calendars, notes and todo lists between Android and your GNU/Linux PC without having to give away all your data to third parties or having to pay monthly subscription fees.
Hopefully someone will develop this. Once Android has the same functionality as Palm organizers from the 90s, it will be more useful and perhaps even cease to being a mere toy.
...apps as good as what I had on my Palm Pilot, that will sync directly with my PC without going through someone's web service.
A task manager with actual start dates, end dates, dependencies, priorities, categories, and roll-over of uncompleted tasks. NOT these all-day appointments that Google pretends are tasks.
A database program that allows me to design my database on my desktop and sync it directly to my device, provides a usable, customizable interface on the device, then reliably syncs data back to my desktop, again WITHOUT an intervening web service and without programming.
Heck, a standardized synchronization manager to handle synchronizing files, data, and settings to the desktop, would be a good start.
It is possible for an active antenna to snif frequencies and determine how strong a private-band transmission MIGHT be. If this was shared, a back-end server could triangulate the location of all private police-band transmissions in a region, and determine where the cop is, where it was, and estimate where its going.
I would like a way to define and apply preference settings like with my non-smartphones in iOS.
For example, at the car, at office, at home, in combination with environmental conditions, location, in motion or not, noisy environment, on dock etc.
Provide the capability to be self activated for some of them, or after prompting the user.
Chainfire has a new app CF.lumen (at work play store is blocked so no link) it's his replacement for the old app. I think it only works in KitKat and above though, can confirm it works on Lolipop.
I'm an Android hipster, you insensitive clod!
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I don't know about "usable", but there is actually a port of the GNU/Octave to Android. It is not some lousy mimic webapp (like Matlab crappy "cloud-run" app), but a full-blown port of the Octave to Android. The app itself is small, but to make it work you have to download Octave Main Package that is freaking HUGE (about 65Mb), but it works!
Well, it's not that you can do full-blown simulations on it, but you can install other toolboxes separately and run some calculations. You can work with matrices, trigonometry, random numbers - not very convenient on a smartphone (it uses a Terminal Emulator to run) and no sexy GUI (opensource - what do you want...), but still pretty awesome.
Other than this, I use Andie Graph emulator of famous TI-8x calculators. You need to get a ROM of a device (Google is your friend), but it can run TI-86 on your smartphone. Useful and free of charge.
There aren't any good app store apps. All the app stores I've used from a tablet/mobile are very lacking. My biggest complaint is browsing. First, you never know how many apps are in the current category you're looking through. Is there one more page to go or 300 more pages? Second, how do you return? If you browse through the first 30 pages (assuming you're counting because they don't tell you you're on page 30) then stop to do something else, when you come back you have to flip through those same 30 pages to get back where you were. For a website you can at least bookmark or edit the HTML link. The app stores should let you jump to some specific point so you can browse better. I like to look around to find things I didn't know I needed. You can't use search for something like that.
In 2015, the question is where do you find PC software?
A few crypto products need efficiency and performance. But, many don't. Many existing products are optimized for efficiency and performance, even when these goals are contrary to the stated goals of the product. Frequently, crypto solutions unnecessarily limit the size of keys. They extend the lifetime of keys. They limit the number of available keys. In many cases, all three of these latter goals are false savings.
We rarely use symmetric crypto, even though it is frequently simpler and more robust. Public Key is almost always preferred, even when it is easy to distribute keys.
Reliable, trustworthy sources of truly random numbers seem to be very useful, inexpensive, and straightforward to create. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
If we are interested in secure communications, it should be normal and expected that we would pick up several hardware random number generators. We should have multiple simple, robust, trustworthy tools to generate symmetric keys. We should have multiple tools to utilize simple, robust, trustworthy symmetric crypto.
Instead, we seem to focus on always using a single complex public key solution even when it is not appropriate.
In my ignorance, I have been trying to map out a simple, robust tool for system administration, that makes use of symmetric crypto. See: https://it.wiki.usu.edu/201501...
I would really like to learn that I have been wasting my time.
Stop right there.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
And actually interacting with the world around you?
Until there is an app to open bottles I see no need in a so called smart phone.
The most dangerous drug
just like a lot of other people
Amazon's Echo -- Echo, for anyone who doesn't know, is a device that sits around and waits for you to ask it, or tell it, things. Like "set a timer for 22 minutes" or "what's the weather" or "what is 22 divided by 7" or "Play some classical music" and a whole host of similarly useful things. We have one and are most impressed with it -- as a first step.
The way it works is you wake it up with its name, then ask, it sends the audio to servers on the net, which speech-to-text it, and then they figure out how to answer you, send it back, and there you go. Which means that the questions and answers it can handle will be limited to generally known or knowable data of only a somewhat local nature (e.g. the current weather.) So "Alexa, what's the weather?" gets you "In Podunk, it's -12 degrees with mostly sunny skies."
So I wrote them and suggested an API over the local wifi network (it's on wifi already in every installation) where a local computer could hook in, and either pre-or post Amazon's evaluation after the speech-to-text, take a swing at answering the question or obeying the command.
So you could say, "Dad will be at the gym from 5pm till 6 pm today", Amazon would evaluate that as WTF, it'd get passed to the local system, which would store the info and tell the Echo that the input was handled, and pass back a confirmation like "Got it" or "Ok, amending dad's schedule today to add the gym from 5 to 6 pm." Later, little Seymour could ask (between four and five) "Where's daddy?" and the app could respond with "Probably at the gym until 6pm", and Echo would then text-to-speech the answer and hand it over to little Seymour.
Likewise, local in-house temperature, alarm status, variously local DB driven inquiries (inventories, expert systems, etc.)
All Amazon really needs for this is an SSH port hooked to the result of WTF (currently WTF gets you "I'm sorry, I didn't understand the question")
Then we could build our own Echo application ecosystem.
I already have extensive code that parses questions in text form and appropriately queries an expert DB, returning variously deep answers in text. Given the hooks as described, I think I could have Echo answering custom queries and taking custom data in under an hour, most of which would be spent reading the new docs to figure out talking to the Echo itself. :)
I got a nice letter back thanking me for the idea. Here's hoping.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
My employer keeps the time in a specific format: YYYY-DDD-HH-MM-SS UTC
I would really like an app that would
1. Display the current time in both YYYY-DDD-HH-MM-SS UTC and YYYY-MM-DD-HH-MM-SS local time (which for me is EST/EDT but nice to be configurable, since I have machines also in MST/MDT)
2. Allow me to enter a time, in either format, and convert it to the other.
I wrote a GTK program for my Linux machine, that I can't get working on my Windoze machines. But having it on the iPhone/iPad would be great.
There are zero good, classic-style turn-based RPGs like the Exile and Avernum series. Seriously, ZERO! I was as shocked as you were. There's an ungodly expensive Final Fantasy version for Android but that's not really old enough to be "classic." I'm talking like Dragon Warrior and other dungeon crawl and mission RPGs.
Well, it's a tool in the tool box but even if you had $50,000 worth of power tools from the New Yankee Workshop that doesn't make you Norm Abram.
All too often, people self-diagnose, find the "cure" on the interwebs, or listen to morons like Dr. Oz. You still need a trained physician to prescribe a course of treatment.
I personally make the same distinction as I did in the 80s -- app -> application -> serious software. IE all user-space software that isn't a game.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
"Siri, answer the phone" -- Hands-free and to loud-speaker. In CA one is not permitted to touch-operate their phone while driving.
Table-ized A.I.
They are called DEM's have been easily available since mid 1990's go to:
http://gis.ess.washington.edu/data/raster/tenmeter/byquad/yakima/index.html
There is not a single app in iOS that is the equivalent of WiFi Analyser for Android, a bloody useful app for checking the WiFi conditions around you, channel overlaps, signal strengths, site mapping etc etc etc.
Not a single fucking one.
There is no App in iOS that is the equivalent of Androids GPS Status app, really handy as a tool to look at all the data from the various hardware sensors onboard a phone, various GPS stats (speed, altitude, satellite coverage and signal strengths, etc etc etc etc).
Not a single fucking one.
Thanks Apple.
I'd like one that improved the quality and stability of phone calls. That would be awesome.
load "linux",8,1
The app (or plugin) I want will pick a random 1-5 minute sections out of a collection of videos. This would be great for LAN parties or Weddings. Currently there is nothing that can do this short of breaking the video into chunks yourself then randomizing them with VLC.
only one everything
which is half the story. I use SleepTime by Azumio. If apps collect HR and BP they should be able to give you parameters of the rhythm including rhythm-adjusted average (MESOR), amplitude and time of peak (acrophase). MDs hate isolated data points.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
The guys at EES just released a $10 app, though not free. There are also python apps. Another good one for quick calcs is Wolfram alpha. I agree there needs to be a great open source app with programmable functionality and saved scripts.
There is not a decent point of sale app for phones or tablets. There are really bad ones, but no good one.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Better idea: Use an online IDE. I've been using Cloud9, and it keeps its state between sessions, up to and including running terminal programs. It's even open-source (to some degree) so you can install it on your private server. Syncing IDE files from place to place is not a very good solution, it's better to either have a central server to remote into. The cloud services can be good ways to take the server management off your hands. It has many of the same drawbacks as a remote desktop, but RD has heavier bandwidth requirements, and possibly other software-related issues.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Uh, no FLOSS, no joy. There's been too much of that proprietary crap already.
Ezekiel 23:20
This app would come with a feature that completely erases itself and any record that you even considered using it.
Why? I don't think this is possible, at least without root.
This kicks in if you don't positively identify that you are still alive and coherent every 6 hours. The lawyers would make sure this feature is present.
Because who needs sleep, right? What situations do you see this being useful for, other than paranoiacs with too little to do? What real-life situation is going to be that time-critical?
Since you might be using this app in the wilderness...
Where there are typically no data services, and emergency situations are frequently lethal within much less than six hours.
...while you are foraging, there are some sister apps you might like; one that estimates if you can jump that ravine, and another that tells you if there are enough handholds on that cliff face for climbing...
I've seen some slot canyons that were jumpable, but nothing I'd call a ravine. Having a loaded pack pretty much screws those sorts of ideas anyway. Your best bet for these apps would be something that just says, "No, you can't do that." to any given situation.
However, there is room for an app that would tell you about climbing routes in the local area. The hard part would be getting a database that had that information, and the other hard part would be making it useful to people beyond the reach of data services.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
fsck \ chkdsk is missing from android
I want an app that can - possibly with some help from me - take/make a recording of me talking(singing/whatever) and then change it into what it sounds for _me_ inside my head.
I want people to know who I think I am, not what I come across as :-)
(Does that exist? I bet there exists some book/magazine db thing that can scan names and barcodes to both build up a db and tell me if I already own the item I'm currently looking at.)
I wasn't able to find an Android app to use my phone as a USB keyboard when my laptop's or desktop's is broken.
I want an app that constantly times everything when I drive, so I can look back and see which is the fastest way of getting somewhere. Here in Simi Valley (CA) there are a number of different ways I can drive home from, say, Costco. I choose which way to go mostly by whim, and by now I've driven each way many times. If my phone had been tracking everything, I would know which route is fastest, or if they're the same.
Yes there is. It's called Xcode. Try to develop an app, and if a necessary public API doesn't exist, there's no app for that. Or if you develop an app and a submission to Apple's App Store gets rejected for a reason other than sloppy implementation, there's no app for that.
For example, just the other day I wanted to listen to a sound file on my phone and it was a really long file. Something like 12 hours long. And generally when I am dealing with these files, I split them into 10 minute segments so they can be listened to easily without having to remember where in the giant file I was last time. I just remember I was on file 25 at 3 minutes. Most sound listening programs also don't deal with really large sound files very well. So it makes everything more manageable when they're split up.
Anyway, long story short, I looked for such a program on android and it apparently doesn't exist. Lots of stuff for making ringtones but that isn't what I'm after.
You can't really compete with the wealth of software on desktop OS's They've been around too long and the bars for entry are non-existent.
That said, if someone knows of such a program, then please let me know.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
This app exists on Android; it's called AIDE. It doesn't exist on Windows Phone, Windows RT, or iOS, due to their walled garden policy.
SoundHound reportedly has a singing/humming mode, but it didn't work when I tried it. But that might be the music publishers' fault more than anything. The developer of a name that tune app needs a database, and I read long ago that the incumbent music publishers are unwilling to license the compositions that they control at an affordable rate. You get better results with recorded music because record labels have already built a database that CD manufacturers and YouTube use to automatically identify possible infringements, and they see name-that-recording services such as Shazam and Google Song Search as a way to sell records.
But I imagine it gets better as time goes on as products you've bought before are easy to reorder.
Ideally you could add products to your reorder list by scanning the product's UPC/EAN barcode with your phone's rear-facing camera.
A want an App that makes me enjoy making homework in such a way that I really enjoy making my homework more then I enjoy watching the latest season of Game of Thrones ore any other great TV show. In short, I want an App that makes making homework an addiction, a couch potato addiction. Not kidding!
This is just a casual wish. However it has often ocurred to me that I'd like to know what bird made a particular call. It would be great to record a call and get an answer of what species makes that call.
I even went on the web and hunted down some sites with birdcall recordings. Took forever and I never did find exact matches to some of the calls I hear near my home.
Not a smartphone user myself so I cannot claim to have searched the product space for such an app.
In your opinion, what's the appropriate level of abstraction for the task of "make a set of web documents available so that I can refer to them later when my device has no Internet connection"? And what app on your preferred mobile operating system does this well?
yeah but you can only use one app at a time so what's the problem?
Being able to use only one app at a time is the problem. If they were web apps, I could have more than one open at once and switch between them. With native apps on some mobile platforms, one app has to close completely (in the same way that it would if I were done using it for the day) and the other to open from scratch (in the same way that it would if I were using it for the first time in the day) whenever I switch from viewing the information presented in one to viewing the information presented in the other. An iPad's display is as big as four iPhone displays, especially prior to the 6; why can't it show four iPhone apps?
Since the world is telling us we're going mobile and that desktop and laptop computers are retarded I'd like an app that can transcode my DVD's and Blurays to MKV files with x264 video compression, all the various audio compressors, and OCR's the VobSub subtitles into SRT (text) subtitle tracks. Oh, and it has to work with anamorphic projections as well as "forced subtitles."
On linux I used OGMRip for this. Despite its clunky UI I think it's still the best transcoding front end out there, supporting GOCR and Tesseract backends for OCR subs.
Now that I'm on OS X the work flow is completely rooted. HandBrake seems to be the best transcoding front end out there for OS X but it doesn't support subtitle OCR. You have to rip to MKV with VobSub subtitles first, then use Subler to convert the MKV into an M4V with just the subtitle tracks, then export the subtitle tracks to SRT (which is what actually does the OCR processing), and finally use mkvmerge to merge the SRT(s) with the original MKV to create a new MKV with text subtitles.
Fucking OS X, what a pain in the arse! I think I'll go back to linux.
When people are using phone apps, they are usually looking for one of 3 things:
1) Communication.
Except iOS offers applications no way to let users communicate which open Wi-Fi hotspots are nearby.
If someone's going to do spreadsheet work for example, they'll likely be at a desk, or they'll take their laptop with them.
Unless they're trying to use a tablet as a substitute for a mini-laptop once laptop manufacturers dropped the 10.1" size in favor of 11.6".
Can any apps do that for me? :P
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I want a browser app that blocks auto refresh, all popup/unders/sign up windows, and disallows modal dialog boxes. I want a reminder app that isn't a POS. This reminder app should have a bug-me setting so that it reminds me over and over and over again. Don't even get me started on calendars! Lastly, apple iCloud sync sux terribly.
you can hit the home button, switch to another then home button again and go back to the other.
When you hit the "home" button, the system often purges cached items from memory to make room for the other application, and the application has to go back to the Internet to retrieve them again. If you have cellular data, this costs you money (1 cent per MB is typical for data plans in the USA). If not, and you aren't near Wi-Fi, the application just fails with the error message "You are offline". Besides, the full-screen transition to the home screen and additional full-screen transition to the other application induce an effect analogous to the amnesia that one experiences when passing through doorways. (See #5 in this list.)
It is perfectly possible to copy some text in one app and paste in another for example
True, but that isn't evidence of multitasking. Classic Mac OS had copy and paste from one application to another before it had MultiFinder.
You CLAIMED you proved my points on hosts wrong & couldn't back it up:
"I tore apart your stupid hosts file crapola." - by BarbaraHudson (3785311) on Tuesday August 19, 2014 @10:46AM (#47703255) Homepage
Where? THEN you agreed that a system with less moving parts doing the SAME JOB as one with more parts is better too:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Hosts files don't *ONLY* do more than what YOU like, in "Almost ALL Ads Blocked" (crippled by default & sold out so it doesn't fully work anymore defeating its OWN purpose) Hosts do MORE with less parts than AdBlock & more efficiently, by far!
---
Funniest part's when you said "who vetted your app":
""Who has independently vetted it?" - by BarbaraHudson (3785311) on Tuesday August 19, 2014 @10:46AM (#47703255) Homepage
Ok:
The BEST in the security antimalware/antispyware business currently, http://www.av-test.org/en/news... per that VERY recent test's results, who also host & RECOMMEND my program for hosts, is who -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... (Malwarebytes' hpHosts).
Let's see YOU or the wannabe bullshitter raymorris whom I caught flat-footed fucking up & lying do better, ok?
Losers... lol!
All YOU could manage vs. this FAIR challenge to you? A bogus unjustifiable downmod -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...
APK
P.S.=> Barb/Tom (with multiple sockpuppets too http://slashdot.org/~BarbaraHu... = http://slashdot.org/~tomhudson... = http://slashdot.org/~Barbara%2... ) you've destroyed yourself yet again... apk
How about an app that translates abnormal sounds to someone who is deaf.. Such as.. I hear water running.. (I've left the not water on for hours) The toilet flushed (not good when you are home alone) A knock on the door. Frantic banging on the door Baby crying Tornado sirens smoke detector beeping (Couldn't figure out why my dog was shaking) Unidentified noise (db level)
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
There is still no good file maker option for android users other than placing FM database onto the insecure web.
I work in flooring. The apps I use like floor covering soft for my flooring business have all gone subscription, still no competition on price. $150/month is absurd.
I'd like a way to easily report drunk drivers. If I'm driving, and I have a dash camera, and I see a drunk driver, then I want to push a button and have information automatically sent to the local police or highway patrol. Send the police my location, the direction that I'm traveling, and images of the car driven by the drunk driver. Send then an image about every third of a second, or send a low-resolution video.
If there's a way for the camera to focus only on the drunk driver's car, then fine. But I don't see a big problem if the camera sends images of other cars also.
I wish I'd had that last Christmas, when a driver was weaving so badly on the freeway!
Of course, this information should be sent only when we request to send it.
In which case you're going to have a real hard time syncing to or from another machine no matter what you do, n'est-ce pas?
I'd like to have an app that records quality of WiFi signal depending on location of the phone in 3D space. Show it as 3D heap map that I can rotate and zoom. That would allow me to identify the zones with good/bad reception in a building, find out where to put the next AP or whether moving AP 30 cm helps. I might try to write one myself when I find some time ...
I've been thinking the same thing. I'd really like a math app that generates sequences and series for me to solve, and more intelligently designed expert system apps that can problem solve. It seems like the majority of apps out there are sloppily made, full of ads, and aren't as useful as they could be.
Many applications (I refuse to use the term 'app' that diminishes the need for quality, but prefer the term 'applet') are still poorly written and documented. The obvious desire to release a product and start getting paid smells the same as a generation that values instant gratification over investment. I want an application that identifies and rejects poor software, sending it back to the code mill for completion.
You're no person. You're an "it". A transsexual freak.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
Any other pearls of wisdom regarding transsexuals?
(poke poke poke the troll)
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
There's a difference among continuous connectivity, intermittent connectivity, and no connectivity. It's possible for a computer, especially a laptop, to be connected to the Internet only once every few hours. Someone might want to get work done between when a machine temporarily stops being connected and when it becomes connected again.
I used SoundHound a while ago. Only works with audio and maybe tapping a beat IIRC.
.
It worked. Few bought into it. You were just born a generation late! =8-D
... "When you pry the source from my cold dead hands."
What if every cell phone constantly monitored temperature, barometric pressure, gravity?, gps, and other stuff and uploaded all the data to a super computer that could use it all for predicting weather patterns? Or does Google already do that?
it's getting harder and harder to find a single function device.. ya know.. like a fucking cell phone that is ONLY a cell phone. a device millions and millions would use and prefer over a 'smartphone'.. no camera, no mp3 player, nothing fancy except voice calls, and maybe texting, and with real, tactile buttons. that's it.
Wolfram Alpha
If you are looking for an app, ask at http://softwarerecs.stackexcha...
People there will search for apps that fit your particular requirements (features, OS, license, etc).
It is also a good way to find new project ideas, just look at the app requests that have no fit yet: http://softwarerecs.stackexcha...
I describe the lego piece I need, I point the camera to a pile of pieces (moving slowly over the pile), the app marks the piece I am looking for.
butt, I'm sure as hell not going to blurt it out here. It is a really simple little piece of code, but I'm not a coder so, if any of you devs out there are interested in a collaboration, send me a private message. This will be a very very small bit of work that will help a lot of people and quite possibly put some change in our pockets. That's all I can say for now. OBTW: HAPPY NEW YEAR /.!!!
Dear Microlimp: I give you 2 valid product keys for win7 and you reject both of them. Piss off you wankers!!!
It is very bad judging by your results shown here http://img1.wikia.nocookie.net...
Hahahaha, you gotta be kidding me! BarbaraHudson's a Frank N. Furter?
OK, where do I download that? Is that on GitHub?
Ezekiel 23:20
Hey apk,
All raymorris has is minusmods vs. that post of mine he downmodded.
Just because people don't like something you posted and thus mod it down, doesn't mean that someone in the discussion did the down-modding. You have no way to know who the moderators were, and accusing random people of doing so will make the discussion contributors not take you seriously.
Why not make your point(s) without making personal attacks? If you want to be taken seriously, then discuss things rationally *and* politely. If you are only here to attack in hopes of "destroying" people, then you are clearly asking moderators to jump all over you.
So are you here to contribute and be taken seriously, or is this merely a search-and-destroy effort?
If you want your comments to reach more people, sign up for an account and build up a tiny bit of karma so that your posts start with a score of 1 or 2, instead of 0. It really isn't that much effort.