alt Hacker NewsSoftware that today is overwhelmingly prepackaged and usually professional, which I think at this point the nerds should reclaim:
* Podcast apps
* Music listening apps
* Feed readers
* Bluesky clients
* Note-taking apps
* Desktop bookmarking/read-later apps
* Chat and instant messaging
* Time trackers
* Recipe managers
These are all things that you can get better-than-replacement-grade results from Claude on --- not necessarily the best, not necessarily the most globally competitive, but certainly an application more closely tailored to exactly what you want it to do for your own idiosyncratic work style.
Music.app is a miserable experience, and I can just tell as I use it that it's miserable trying to serve me. But Apple long ago factored all the meaningful bits out of Music.app into MusicKit. Why am I still using Music.app? MusicKit is the real product now. This is new.
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Our social media should be decentralized and local first, allowing for bespoke clients on any OS.
This is an experiment towards that:
https://github.com/dharmatech/9social
The first client is written for plan9. This keeps the design honest. (If it can run on plan9/rc/acme...)
Video demo:
The current implementation is less than 3000 lines of code.
And speaking of Emacs... 9social was heavily inspired by an Emacs project called Org Social:
> but certainly an application more closely tailored to exactly what you want it to do for your own idiosyncratic work style.
Yep, I'm doing this all the time. I've been doing it for a year. The silliest on is an IG post previewer. My app is better suited to me than the preview function that Instagram provide itself.
* Time trackers
https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/timeivy
An unfinished spreadsheet-based interface for entering time. Meant for consulting, but never got around to persisting the data. Mostly created it because I couldn't stand all the ways that time trackers force users to enter structured time when there's a cute algorithm to handle just about every way a human might naturally enter time.
https://stackoverflow.com/a/49185071/59087
* Recipe managers
https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/recipe-fiddle
In the days of LLMs, it would be far easier to categorize ingredients and format them into TeX for publishing as a PDF file. The idea behind this project was to let people essentially copy/paste recipes off the web or scans of handwritten content and autoformat it.
Music apps especially went downhill, spotify and tidal etc need to offer apis so we can integrate several sources in one app. They used to offer much more. I was able to import my library into spotify once (thoigh it could only hold 10k item back then). I want all my music in one place, not 4 apps
I just made a one-shot Android music player because I need a very simple one to listen to tracks to practice drums, and I need to go back from the beginning a lot of time, reduce speed, open them from Whatsapp when my teacher sends them to me and access easily the last 4-5 played. There was nothing in F-Droid that ticked all the box so I just made my APK.
I'd add Email to the list.
Email is right there waiting for disruption.
Many of them have been reclaimed. Check out the "awesome self hosting" GitHub repo.
Podcasts: audiobookshelf
Music: 500 different subsonic clients, many of which are good. Or some fun tuis
Feed readers: lol, more than there are grains of sand in Torvalds' flippers
Note taking: again innumerable, also, just use nvim or emacs of course
Chat: tons of very good self hosted options that can save orgs thousands a month.
Rather than build your own from scratch, rediscovering already solved issues, why not contribute to or fork a FOSS project? LLMs make it easy easier to get up to speed on large projects
The common denominator: the data needs to be owned by you, or at least made accessible. Companies love to create walled gardens where they own the content and control how you access it, making this kind of personalized interface impossible. Hopefully we can push back more now.