99 Problems

June 30, 2023 10:50 AM

I am a new member of the 2023 tech unemployment club. I would like to spend a large part of my free time building a free app to help people (particularly mefites). Tell me about your problem so I might improve the lives of your family or group.

I am not looking to build a time machine or anything incredibly complex. I am a hobbyist programmer and enjoy the challenge of digging into a straight forward problem and coming up with a pragmatic solution. My goal during my time off is to see someone smile and say "This makes my life so much easier!".

I am in no rush to jump back into product management so I have the time to see a few things through to the end. If I can help a local theater, robotics club, or community cleanup, I would consider it a very valuable use of my time.

Help me learn about your group's problem so I might solve it. Mefi mail is open as well.

posted by jasondigitized to Grab Bag (32 answers total)

Did you see this question? Maybe you could make the perfect decluttering gamification app!
posted by moonmilk at 10:52 AM on June 30, 2023 [12 favorites]

I really want a simple, elegant visual toothbrushing timer. That's the app I keep almost but not quite building.
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 11:01 AM on June 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

An app that sends me notifications to put down my phone and do something else at intervals.
posted by chaiminda at 11:10 AM on June 30, 2023 [10 favorites]

A podcast app where you can listen to things you downloaded as much as you want, but you only have a small amount per day when you can browse and download more.
posted by catquas at 11:13 AM on June 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

I would like an app that will pull data from some weather forecasting API and let you compare the weather in different places in whatever time scale the api allows (hourly/daily/ morning-afternoon-evening-overnight). I would like it to include temperatures and expected rainfall and general forecast "partly cloudy" or "cloudy with showers" or whatever.

This was based on recently having to pick a camping spot by finding the one place in the province safe for a lightening-phobic dog and that would not have rain during actual set up or take down of tents. Trying to remember which park was sunny on Saturday vs. rainy on Monday, and how many timeslots were rainy and how many were swimmable in each place etc. etc. was a bitch and of course it keeps changing. Visualizing them all at once -- a column for each place a row for each time period (or vice versa) would have been great.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 11:36 AM on June 30, 2023 [4 favorites]

An app that helps you find grassroots orgs that are doing political action & advocacy for whatever topics you choose, then aggregates them into small tasks that you can view each week and track your involvement.

An app that makes a better, more consumable viewing experience for congress.gov, showing bills that are active and how/when people can contact their lawmakers about what we care about.
posted by oxisos at 11:40 AM on June 30, 2023 [9 favorites]

Years ago, I built a database with Zoho Creator for an annual nonprofit program some friends were running off of a lumbering Google spreadsheet. I'd never done such a thing before and it wasn't very elegant to start with, and since then I've periodically bolted things on to it that make sense to me but that others struggle to incorporate to their workflows. They still do more on paper than I'd like, and are sometimes surprised to find out about app features I consider basic functions. There are also things I do manually for them that I'm certain could be automated somehow. Basically, I am perpetually aware that it could be so much better if someone who actually had formal experience were involved, and every year the rest of my life keeps me from being able to really dig into it to better approximate being such a person.

I don't have enough experience to know where this falls on a scale of trivial-to-time-machine. "Community cleanup" is probably the closest match from what you mentioned, if people in the community could submit confidential clean-up requests that needed to be confirmed complete and eligible and then tracked across various considerations like which supplies were to be needed/expended and whether various preparation tasks had been completed, as well as who would be assigned to actually go out and do the thing on a day of action wherein they might be dispatched to a series of sites.
posted by teremala at 11:58 AM on June 30, 2023

A 1-minute-a-day vocabulary learning app that teaches me a new word each day in my desired language+learning level (probably pulling from some standard vocabulary learning lists), and quizzes me on one word I've learned already. No games, no owls.
posted by redlines at 11:59 AM on June 30, 2023 [5 favorites]

An app that ingests several peoples' google calendars and suggests available times to hang out, perhaps with the help of AI.
posted by woodvine at 12:01 PM on June 30, 2023 [9 favorites]

A bill I suggested just passed the New York City Council. Therefore, starting January 1 2024, locations of the 5000+ public access defibrillators in the city will be available in our open data portal. I could use help with tools (not necessarily mobile apps) to:

analyze that data to find the AED "deserts"

make it easy for someone to make and label (and translate into different languages) a map of the AEDs in a specific neighborhood, and to share it digitally or print it out in different sizes/dimensions

That's to start. More in the recent entries on my blog, in the "Defibrillators in NYC" category.
posted by brainwane at 12:02 PM on June 30, 2023 [16 favorites]

A widget that will stay pinned to my sidebar or on top of my other windows at all times (% transparency setting would be a bonus) and show me my day as a timeline, pulling events from my calendar and clearly marking the current time, so it would be immediately obvious what I'm supposed to be doing at that exact moment. I think this would work well for timeboxing and/or people with many meetings.
posted by gakiko at 12:02 PM on June 30, 2023 [6 favorites]

I keep meaning to build a workout timer that has a clock, music library access, and heart rate all on the same screen.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 12:08 PM on June 30, 2023 [4 favorites]

Lovely!

When browsing FB or YT, I often come across Facebook "reels" (videos of c 20 seconds) demonstrating an exercise that I want to try; but I forget how they go by the time I'm at the gym. It would be nice if there were a way to save those to a dedicated list (like "ab exercises to try".) (If this utility already exists I don't know it; if I hit "save" on a reel, it just saves it to a single "reels list.")
posted by fingersandtoes at 12:13 PM on June 30, 2023 [5 favorites]

An old-timey mobile game where I pay $3 and get access to an ad-free, stress-free game experience. Puzzle, strategy, idle clicker, or other genre that I can pause at any time without penalty.
posted by shock muppet at 12:13 PM on June 30, 2023 [8 favorites]

An app that displays nothing but a few giant buttons. Each button can have a label I choose, like "Car parked in bike lane" , "flexpost broken", "car parked in bus lane". Each time you press a button it generates a record with the button label, the time, and the GPS location. For bonus points, let me easily display those online overlaying Open Street Maps or Google Maps.
posted by mrgoldenbrown at 12:14 PM on June 30, 2023 [4 favorites]

When my kids were younger & couldn't read, I would have liked a visual timer that used images rather than text. So I could set a series of alarms & the kids would see what they were supposed to do when each went off: for 6 am it would show a sun (to get up), 6:15 would show clothes (get dressed), 6:30 food (breakfast), 6:45 toothbrush, 6:50 shoes, 7:00 school bus, etc.
posted by belladonna at 12:25 PM on June 30, 2023 [11 favorites]

A pregnancy movement tracker that is NOT a kick-counter, but, rather, lets you push a button when baby is moving and generates a "usual active times" output (per day), and maybe alerts when you've missed X hours of movement/button pushing.
posted by DebetEsse at 12:36 PM on June 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

This might be out of scope, but what the hey. I want a smartwatch that can connect to my Aranet4 sensor and vibrate when the sensor goes above a given level of CO2. That would let me keep the thing in my purse and get a notification I'll actually notice.
posted by eirias at 12:55 PM on June 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

1. A camera app for use in libraries and bookstores that does one thing: rotates the camera view 90 degrees in real time so one can browse the books on the shelves without twisting one's head around. (The book spines would then scroll like movie credits as the user moved down the shelf.)

2. An app for Android that keeps YouTube videos playing when the user wants to switch to a different app or turn the phone's display off.
posted by Rykey at 1:14 PM on June 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

Is reinventing Google too big? Lots of us have been complaining about the death of search. I would pay cash money for an app that searched the internet like Google 2011.
posted by shadygrove at 1:33 PM on June 30, 2023 [9 favorites]

You know what would be cool? A to-do list that deletes items if they get too old, incentivizing users to take care of things before they disappear. I have lots of “non-urgent” stuff that gets back-burnered until it completely calcifies and since I’m terrible at self-imposed deadlines, I need an app that will impose them for me.
posted by delight at 2:19 PM on June 30, 2023

My wishlist for video meetings:

An add-on to videoconference software like Teams, Google Meet and Zoom for small meetings that tracks in real time how long each attendee is talking, and how involved/engaged people are. I would love to see a way to have someone’s video feed start to fade if they start talking more than their fair share of time. Visual and audio cues to encourage more equal participation. And while we’re on this topic, improve the audio processing to make it possible for more sound channels to sound good at once. Prioritize making the audio in meetings sound amazing!
posted by oxisos at 2:25 PM on June 30, 2023 [4 favorites]

A location sensitive alarm that will alert you when you are arriving at your bus/train stop. I’ve been thinking about this since my days of riding SEPTA and NJT long distances and wishing I could take a nap and not worry about missing my stop.

Something I needed for my old job: an app that selects 20 minutes worth of music from a large playlist and plays it at a specific time of day without clipping any of the tracks.
posted by sciencegeek at 2:52 PM on June 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

I need an ereader app that is just like Marvin but still being maintained and updated. It would also be wonderful if it could be on android so I could switch between devices and save my place. Does not need a solid three quarters of the bells and whistles of Marvin, just simple ad-free with purchase, can import epub and mobi formats, allows tons of custom tags and lists that are generated as well as user created, a few lighting or color modes you can save, and can display a two column landscape mode like an open book with good gesture controls along the center spine and edges. Okay actually maybe that is a lot of bells and whistles but we’re going pie in the sky, here.
posted by Mizu at 3:05 PM on June 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

An app that displays public places with diaper changing tables.
posted by imalaowai at 3:44 PM on June 30, 2023 [4 favorites]

Sorry to hear about the job, and hope you find something amazing for your next gig!

I would love to see an app that connects dogs that need walks in certain areas with people that want to walk dogs. Like Rover, but no payments, just for funsies, and no commitments to do ongoing walks or walks way in advance. Just like, "oh it's a nice day and I want to go for a walk, any dogs in the neighborhood want to join me?" I'd also love the same type of thing to find tennis partners.
posted by carlypennylane at 5:56 PM on June 30, 2023 [10 favorites]

I'd like a Windows app that I've been calling "I/O U" (with the U being the usb symbol). When I use the app on PCA and connect via a USB cable to PCB, PCB thinks I've plugged in a USB dock with 'attached' screens, keyboard, mouse, speakers, webcam, network, etc. The 'attached' devices should be configurable in the app and be integrated as follows:

1. Screens can either be windows on PCA, or virtual screens (i.e. enable-able via PCA's vanilla Windows' display options). The latter could be implemented as an immutable window that is full screen on the virtual screen and wouldn't actually be visible on PCA. In AR/VR all of the virtual screens could be displayed in virtual space the same way normal screens can.
2. The mouse on PCA should pass through to PCB when the mouse cursor is over the window or virtual screen. For the latter, if the virtual screen is set up to be to the right of PCA's actual screen (in display options), then mouse movement between screens should look as if PCB's screen is attached to PCA.
3. The keyboard on PCA should similarly be affected, with keystrokes being sent to PCB when one of it's virtual screens is the "active window".
4. Audio devices should make the sounds from PCB audible on PCA. Ditto microphones from PCA to PCB, etc
5. Any webcam on PCA should be made available on PCB as a USB webcam.
6. Folders on PCA can be provided to PCB as external storage devices.
7. Network connectivity should be provided to PCB.
8. More pseudo devices?
9. Cross OS support - for PCA and/or PCB
10. Multiple child PCs?
11. over network instead of USB

Importantly, the devices that PCB sees, should not require installing additional drivers beyond the generic drivers normally available with Windows itself. Having said that, for iterative development purposes and as a miscellaneous catchall, other actual devices on PCA that aren't (yet) 'fakable' as generic versions could be made available to PCB using plain passthrough. Many of the configuration options intersect with the options of RDP, VMs (VirtualBox etc), and video conferencing.
1-3 (with one virtual screen) are pretty much MVP and, when PCA & PCB are physically together, mean you can do most HCI as if they were a single PC.
+4 & 5 means PCB can be a closed laptop and you can do most remote work as if they were a single PC. Probably MMP.
+6 makes PCB a network peripheral device.
+7 makes PCB a USB peripheral device.
+9/10 makes PCA+PCB a single, multi-OS, multi-PC, environment.
+11 sysops will love you.
posted by gible at 8:46 PM on June 30, 2023

A book wish list database, that lets me put in any book someone tells me about, but that lets me see which books are available on kobo plus, and my local library overdrive. I imagine this would be like goodreads, but you could add any library or e-book service and tell me where they are. Bonus if it says what is available now at the library.
posted by Valancy Rachel at 9:42 PM on June 30, 2023 [4 favorites]

A program launcher that lets you add searchable notes and tags and url to the programs. While there are lots of launchers, none seem to have that feature. Use case is I have installed 2 programs that does Foo. Neither has Foo in their name. A few years later I need to do Foo, but have forgotten their names. Might take a half hour of web searching to find one program.
If I had a program launcher where I could just paste the web description into notes, I could find it immediately.
This could be useful for schools, companies etc to let users find available tools.
posted by Sophont at 1:26 PM on July 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

An audio playlist maker for android that has no bells or whistles. Literally , here are a list of audio files, what do you want to call it, what order does it need to be in, with shuffle option. No art, no ads, no synching. This is for the purposes of ordering all the rehearsal and jam files captured on my phone. I cannot believe something this simple does not exist (if it does please point me at it!).
posted by freya_lamb at 12:11 PM on July 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

(Also, we thank you for your service!)
posted by freya_lamb at 12:12 PM on July 4, 2023

Hey OP it turns out there's a database of exercises already. What if you created a utility that lets a person add selected ones to a list that can be consulted at the gym? I'd use that!
posted by fingersandtoes at 2:42 PM on July 4, 2023