7
votes
Looking for smallish feature suggestions for an open source project
I'm thinking about increasing the level of my open source contributions a bit. Instead of searching blindly until I stumble upon an issue that:
A) Piques my interest
B) I feel somewhat qualified to implement
I figured I'd check with the tildes community. Is there any Open Source software that you use that is missing a feature/capability? Can you give a brief description of it (bonus points for links to an issue tracker with an open ticket :))?
Can't of course promise anything will come of it, but if I do pick up your suggestion at least I'll give you a ping if I make any progress!
There's no place like home. ;)
If you do decide to contribute to Tildes, before you start working on any of the Stage:Unconfirmed ones I would ask @Deimos first though, so you don't end up wasting your time.
What sort of software are you interested in?
Also, it’s “piques,” not “peeks.”
Software that solves some issue people have OR software as art. That is of course a very wide area of interest so here I'm mainly looking for issues people have with some thing they actually use.
Ps. Fixed the spelling :)
If you want software that a large number of people will use, look towards software like FreeCAD or Blender. FreeCAD has some big issues right now, Topological Naming and Assembly being the two that come to mind.
Here's some smallish things I have been thinking about in that same vein:
I'll add a few more throughout the day, so check back later as well.
Could you specify the languages/ frameworks you're most proficient in or are willing to work with? Or are you open to learning any language required?
I have worked with several different general purpose languages: java, c#, f#, golang, scala, python, typescript, javascript, erlang and a bit of php, lua, elm, haskell and rust on the side. So easiest to get going with something developed in one of the more mainstream options, but could be fun to pick up something more esoteric too. Mainly looking for suggestion of things someone wants/needs.
Are you interested in phone app development? If so, I would take a look at Audiobookshelf. The server/web client are both pretty robust and feature full, but the phone apps both need quite a bit of work.
Edit: some high profile features would be a CarPlay/android auto interface and a watchOS/android wear/tizen app.
I'm not sure if this would be considered a feature request or a bug fix, but lately I've been super annoyed by a piece of XFCE. The network manager icon that lives in the system tray area, I'm really not sure what it's called, maybe xfce4-nm-applet or xfce4-popup-networkmanager or something to that effect, but any time you go to connect to wifi it's constantly refreshing the list of available hotspots. Every time it refreshes, it closes the popup menu. Downtown, where there's a hundred hotspots in range, it becomes impossible to find the one you need in between the scans every ~2 seconds.
I'm not sure how to address this. I guess you could prevent it from destroying the popup menu on refresh, but there's bound to be a reason they're doing it this way. Might be a limitation of the toolkit they're using (I just realized I don't know what this is, GTK2?). I guess you could prevent it from refreshing while the menu is open, forcing the user to close the menu to get an updated list, but that's not great either. A "Pause scanning" button would be a great solution, but might be hard to make an elegant interface where the button isn't in the way.
https://gath.io is something I use a fair bit, and it has a few issues open.
I just found this feature request for Firefox, seems like a good way to start contributing to it.