Saturday, January 10, 2009

Cool applications I will probably never have time to write

Here is a list of ideas of web services that would be helpful but I would probably have no time to write. Maybe someone else would...
I'll add future ideas to this page. If you have some of your own, I'd be happy to add them. Even better if you know of a service like this that already exists let me know.

4. Software libraries release tracker (2009-01-10).
A web based tool where I can list all the third party libraries I use for my projects and can be notified (email / RSS) when a library I'm using released a new version. It would also be nice if I could upload a CSV file with my libraries and the current versions I'm using and get a report of what I need to upgrade.
Advanced feature: test libraries transitive dependencies and warn me about possible collisions. For instance, Hibernate is dependent on Log4J version x.y.1 and Spring is dependent on Log4J version x.y.2 - Since I use both Hibernate and Spring I want to be warned about possible incompatibilities I may encounter.
(note to implementer: maven has support for something like this so maybe use it as the core for this)

3. Contact name ring tone (2008-12-20).
When your friends call you they don't introduce themselves because they assume you have caller ID. Now, what if you use a bluetooth earphone? Your phone is sometimes tucked away in your bag (for instance when you drive). When people call and immediately start talking - it sometimes takes a while before you figure out who it is.
The solution is to have your phone figure out you're using an earphone and play the name of the caller instead of the regular ring tone. I guess it would do that by doing text-to-speech on the name in the phonebook entry.

2. An online log collector (2008-12-13).
The logs of your application are sent to this website (by HTTP, JMS, whatever) - You have a simple UI where you can view and query these logs.
What is it good for?
When you have a lot of servers you start finding all kind of weird ways or heavy weight solutions for collecting your logs - I'm looking for something simple.
Update: we created something like this for HiveSight: http://code.google.com/p/appenginelogger/


1. An online job scheduler (2008-12-13).
You have a form where you enter your job's schedule - it could be a simple input field where you enter a cron expression or if you want something more advanced look at the recurring meeting dialog of MS Outlook.
Then let me select from a dropdown list an action to execute (do an HTTP request, call a webservice, run a yahoo pipe, run a simple shell script, etc.).
These jobs will be run according to you schedule schedule.
What is it good for?
For various repetitive automation tasks, monitoring of web servers, anything you can do with crontab, you get the idea.