Organizers

Specifically, Transpose. Here we have a really attractive online tool for sticking structured notes in the cloud. "Structured", here, means typed fields that go into something in the back office that can be searched by type. Notes are also typed in that they are arranged into templated lists; each template has a set of typed fields. If my template includes a date and a location, for instance, I can look for all notes within a mile of a given set of coordinates, plotted on a Maps window.

That is pretty freaking excellent.

Transpose the business is a freemium model that incorporates crowd sourced templates in its "public library". That allows you to leverage some level of information about how other people do things. That's pretty freaking excellent, too.

The free version permits up to 10 templates.

Your mission, if you choose to accept it: write a sketch of the system and the business in Decl. Work on the semantics behind the scenes to make it a reality.

Scanners

Scanning is one of those places where confusion reigns and there is essentially no good open-source software to be found. XSane is the closest the open-source world has come, and it's not very Windows-compatible.

So it might be a reasonable idea to investigate this as a possible relatively simple target UI application.

Anyway, SANE is the Linux project for scanner drivers. There is no Windows support.

HabitRPG to gamify your life

Cute concept!

HN store

Cool idea: use HNN's API to find and present book links ranked and by novelty.  You could do the same for other links mentioned.  I'd really like to start getting into this kind of thing.

PDF generation as a service

This is neat.  Template generation into PDF documents as a service - very slick!

Nice task manager

Droptask.

Docracy: TOS tracker

This is still a very cool idea.

Loggable

Timesheeting.

We can regard this kind of small service as a kind of "sensor" for an overall business process workflow.

legit - git workflow for humans

First, this is a neat way of repackaging git functionality so that even I can grok it.  More interestingly, the notion of packing up workflow like this is kind of what I'm working toward lately in general.

Why wireframing tools suck

Interesting proposal for a wireframing tool. [hnn]

Workflowy

Workflowy is a nested, shareable, annotatable to-do list manager.  Slick.

JSON Blob

Here's a neat online tool for testing JSON-based APIs.

Wireframe.cc

Free wireframing tool Wireframe.cc.  Seems kind of ... low-powered to me.  But still interesting,

Regexper.com

Neat! Regexper.com lets you enter a regexp and it shows you a really nice graphical rendering of the language it matches.  I like everything about it!

Mandrill

This is a neat tool by the folks at MailChimp - handles incoming and outgoing mail and uses Webhooks for everything.  Mandrill.

Moonbase: animation builder

This looks cute!

Visimojo survey builder

Target!  A visual programmer for surveys.  I find this insanely cool.

Rosalind bioinformatics sequence

Rosalind [hnn] is a really neat sequence of bioinformatics problems and a grader (it generates a data file and checks your output - you program it however you like, but you've got five minutes from getting the data to submit your response).

It's got a forum system, badges, the whole nine yards, and a branding thing if you want to use it in your class.

I'm working through the sequence - but it's a good target application, too.  But yeah, bioinformatics is kind of neat!

QuestionsThree

Target application - QuestionsThree [blog] [hnn] is a nifty gadget that gives you a local phone number that people can call to buzz you into the gate, then texts you that they've done it.  Very neat!

Slick little idea; now the builder is wondering 2. ??? 3. Profit, as one does.

KitBOM

Model this: BOMs for kits.  Neat idea!