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Ask HN: Any service you wish you had?
I'm looking for inspiration for a side project, mainly in the area of developer tools / services for making the devs life easier. Is there anything out there you wish you had to make your life easier?
For example right now, I'm thinking about a device directory with api where you can keep up-to-date on mobile/desktop/console/ereader devices and use the DB in your apps. Also a CSS parser to remove redundancies in a large code base.
Any ideas would be appreciated :)
- jiggy2011 13y agoA really good mysql gui client that runs on Linux and Windows. Doesn't need to have loads of features, just make common things like browsing data sets, creating new tables, deleting data etc very quick.
- jfaucett 13y agoup vote :), theres definately a need for this. The only "good" sql gui out there in my opinion is sequel pro that only runs on mac. Mysql workbench crashes on remote connections on linux and is a sluggish beast, it just gets worse from there phpmyadmin...
- jiggy2011 13y agoSQLyog is better (though not free) and will run on Linux using Wine. But Wine makes it ugly and clunky and crash prone.
- tarr11 13y agoI wish that Ruby on Rails worked on Windows.
- dragonwriter 13y agoSince when doesn't Rails work on Windows?
- jfaucett 13y agoThis is interesting. Rails does "work" on windows but the problem is that an extensive amount of gems do not. So for any large/mid-sized project that depends on a lot of other gems like rmagick, postgreSQL, solr, etc, you can basically forget getting it to work under windows, which is really annoying when your trying to test your app on old IE browsers, it would be nice to be able pull your project on windows and directly edit the source and view log files while testing in IE without the hassle of VM's etc.
- jiggy2011 13y agohttp://www.vagrantup.com/ http://www.vagrantup.com/ Edit: Yes it is technically a VM, but it is the lowest friction solution I have found and you can configure it in such a way as to make the VM fairly transparent.
- jfaucett 13y agoThis looks interesting I will definately try it out. But could you explain how this is better / easier than setting up a virtualbox with windows + IE ?
- jiggy2011 13y agoEasiest to just play with it , work through examples and see for yourself. It actually uses virtualbox under the hood (though you can make it work with other virtualisation software) It is much quicker to get a VM up and running since you don't have to run through the installation process of the distro. You just look online for "rails dev box, vagrant" and run the command to download and set it up. It creates a shared folder between host and guest automatically, and port forwarding is very easy to configure in such a way that localhost:8000 can map to guest:80 or whatever. SSH is super easy, just do "vagrant ssh" to get a shell, no key or password settings required. Also integrates with puppet etc and low memory footprint since you just get what you need and not X etc. But it's really the ease and speed of creating VMs that is the killer app for me. So when I start a new project I can just type a few commands and have a fresh VM for that project.
- zachlatta 13y agoI wish there was something akin to Homebrew for Windows package management.
- rbalicki 13y agoA service that takes care of parking tickets, speeding tickets, etc. for me. I miss way too many deadlines. And if you're dreaming big, please take care of my car registration, smog check, registering me to vote when I move, etc. Oh, sorry, this was supposed to be for dev tools. Just noticed. Well, anyway.