My App Ideas Volume 2

FFmpeg + LLM

FFmpeg is an really useful command line tool. Sadly it’s hard to remember all the commands. As a user I’d rather type in what I want, and then get an LLM to figure out the correct command to run. Then users can type things like:

• “Rotate this video 45 degrees”
• “Join these videos together”
• “Resize this to 480p”
• “Grayscale”

It’d be great if this could run offline in the browser, I did try doing this but ran into a lot of difficulties. Now I think it’s easier to just have it as a local desktop application that bundles FFmpeg.

PrintAndMail.com

For a long time I did not own a printer. Whenever I needed to print something I had to find a print shop, get my document loaded onto a USB stick and then go to the print shop. Not super annoying. Mailing stuff is annoying though.

Thea idea with PrintAndMail.com is you upload a document, someone near you prints it and then you go pick it up from them. Additionally, if you specify a physical address the document will be printed and mailed to your address as well.

There are many risks with this idea. These days, less and less organisations require documents to be physically mailed.

Crowd Work Comedian Game

Crowd work comedians often are shit. I want to make a game where you play as a crowd work comedian and use pattern matching and a set of rules to get laughs. The game isn’t super worked out but I want it to be a Roguelike. Maybe as you play, you pick up rules for how to deal with different situations.

If someone says they are a baker, then you say ‘you must make a lot of dough’.

It’s very unlikely I make this game. Lately I’ve been a bit down on game development. It requires a lot of hard work and often the payoff is zero.

GetTravelVisa.com

A website that applies for travel visas on your behalf. You create a profile, upload your travel documents and say what country you want a visa for. Why? Because the forms are often very long and difficult to fill out. I would gladly pay a premium to avoid the pain of applying for a visa. Would other people? I hope so.

Human Action MCP Server

AI can do a lot of stuff, but it also cannot do a lot of things. Basically hire a bunch of people to click buttons, on webpages that try to block AI agents.

Taobao Concierge

Taobao.com is a terrible website. Sometimes I have to use it, because I need to buy something that I can’t find anywhere else. I also imagine there are a lot of people outside of Hong Kong and China that would like to buy things on Taobao and have them delivered to their homes. I just had a quick look and it seems there are already a few companies doing this already.

API to CLI

I recently got Claude to create a NodeJS command line interface (CLI) for my business bankstatementconverter.com. It was pretty easy, but it could be easier. It would be nice if there was a website where I could upload an API specification (openapi.json) and it would automatically publish an NPM CLI that wrapped the API.

Thinking about it more, this idea probably sucks. I had to do a lot of tweaking to get the CLI to behave the way I wanted. I’m sure that will be true for other APIs as well.

API to MCP Server

Similar sort of thing to above except for an MCP server. This idea probably REALLY sucks, because I have never made an MCP server before. I never said these ideas were good.