Various Ideas
I don’t have time to do all / any of these, but a few ideas that have been floating around in my head lately:
mod_mongrel: An Apache module to make configuration of Mongrel / Rails apps easier. It starts up the instances, manages the cluster, chooses available ports, does the proxying automatically, etc. Deploying Mongrel/Rails apps at the moment is too “sysadminny”.
RubyScript: A Firefox plugin to allow Ruby to be used in a Javascript-esque fashion in Web pages. Would be good for off-line / intranet / specialist use. This kinda exists in Microsoft world.
Single text box journalling, notes, etc: A single page with a single text box. You type, it stores. If you type with a ? at the start, it then automatically searches for items matching your query and shows them to you. The ultimate simple note taking system. Just a single text box. Like Twitter, but not public. I’ve 90% developed this already but haven’t been bothered to finish it yet.
Web RAD tool with open source runtime environment: Think along the lines of Coghead, but with an open source runtime environment that anyone can use to run their apps. Imagine Delphi or Visual Basic, but simplified, and browser-based with an open source runtime.
There’s probably more, but these are the ones that I keep thinking about for five minutes each day.. so I figured I should note them down.
April 2nd, 2007 at 1:56 am
WEB RAD. Peter… we are currently developing something like it. Go and check out http://www.applicationexchange.com. Join the beta. or better join our team…;). Cheers.
April 2nd, 2007 at 8:17 am
Hi Peter, I’m currently developing a gem that will setup and manage nginx -> mongrel_cluster -> rails, along with subversion, monit and s3 backup. It’s not mod_apache, but it will take away a lot of the sys adminny part of getting a server up and going and deploying apps.
April 2nd, 2007 at 10:30 am
Hi Peter,
Loving the idea of a single text box for recording everything. I’m using a moleskine for recording everything but it would be handier to have something on my desktop. I’m using Stikkit at the moment for recording some things, but it’s a pain to open Firefox and login all the time.
Matthew
April 2nd, 2007 at 11:05 am
I tried Stikkit, but it annoyed me with its over complexity. It felt like Yahoo instead of Google, if you see what I mean. Lots of extraneous crap.
I wasn’t necessarily thinking of something desktop based (although that’s an easy possibility) but something that’s as super easy as Twitter.. so you can visit the page, IM it, e-mail it, whatever, and it’s a totally transparent, one-step process in every case.