Things I Wish I Had

Idly writing about software I use, features that are missing, software I wish existed and a little bit want to write...

I’ll group them up, but none of these are “spec” quality thoughts or anything. I just want these to exist. Hit me up on some messenger or whatever if you know of one that I don’t.

Unrelated to anything, I reach for the word musing too much. Is it too late to make a resolution to be slightly less pretentious?

personal dashboard

I know that there are a few of these out there, and maybe I just need to try harder into looking at configuring them. I want something that I can easily host that lets me have multiple profiles (me, family members), a public facing page for family level notifications / calendar entries, and then separate personal pages. Something that would make for a really good home page of a browser. I know the APIs of a lot of things have fallen apart and that not nearly as many things as I’d like support RSS anymore, but I feel like at a glance email counts, calendar appointments, to do deadlines, new notifications on different platforms, and maybe the ability to set some quick link tiles would be the real goal here.

A neat bonus would be that public facing page having a mode where you can crunch it down to monochrome for an e-ink display or one of those IoT picture frames or something.

It’s one of those things that wouldn’t be trying to actually BE all of those things, just collate the things that you already use to make them better. Yes, I really just want a new Sunrise Calendar, that’s part of it.

contact book sync

I’ve spoken about this one before, but this is probably one of the things I wish I had the most. I don’t want to manage it even if I do want to write it, I’m not sure it should exist from how much harm it could do if it isn’t managed properly while out in the open (which means maybe it only works federated/self hosted?).

I want something that lets you have a profile, the ability to add friends and group them, and the ability to add your contact information. Each piece of information can be tagged with different access levels, ranging from public to “only this group” security. Each piece of contact information can also have a “preference” level defined, from “I have it but would rather not” to “this is always on and goes to my phone” or something. There should also be a feature where you can select the names of either friends or a group of friends, click a button, and find the most preferred way to contact everyone in that group on the fewest platforms possible.

You should be able to push out updates to your connected friends, but it wouldn’t immediately override their cached version (just so that they have a notice that you DID update it and what you should be removing from any other places you have it written down). Maybe there needs to be a “force override” function as part of that, so that if someone becomes a stalker they don’t get to keep things with no hassle.

Critically, IT IS NOT A MESSENGING PLATFORM ITSELF. Maybe that’s absolutely absurd, I’m sure someone will abuse pushing out updates to be a rudimentary chat application, but I do not think that this software has any business storing message history or especially images. The moderation risk and server capacity needs increase dramatically the second you get those in there, which is bad, that’s the thing we want to avoid! It needs to be cheap enough to run an unmodified potato could handle it, because the moment you get into “well this Mastodon server is shutting down” style cascades the entire thing is ruined. I know that means that a centralized version would be best, but that’s the other thing that brings up the risk. I’m not sure how to balance this. Maybe there isn’t a way! But keeping it as compact as possible just has to be one of the goals, that’s what I do know. Again, just like the personal dashboard, the goal is making things you already use MORE useful.

Polycules and TTRPG groups the world over would worship whoever got this together. It feels even more necessary with how fast platforms are starting and dying, with how limited email is getting, how much people aren’t able to maintain phone numbers, and the fact that Facebook decided to completely abdicate being this for people.

mediamonkey listenbrainz scrobbling plugin

This is incredibly straightforward. I’ve lightly tried to fork the Last.fm plugin to do this and wasn’t able to get it to work, but honestly I only spent about 15 minutes on that experiment. Getting this working would make my life… well, about the same, but with a little bit less confusion around listening to music. As it is, I need to either use my phone or MusicBee to scrobble. Just could be a nicer experience.

hugo tag groups

There might be some way to do this that I just don’t know about, or maybe I just need to write some custom Javascript to make this work really nicely, but I wish I had a way to be able to do combinations of tags on the tag list page. Like, “year in review” + “year” or date filters or something. I know this is really just a limitation of the fact that I’m not using a CMS, just static site generation, but honestly this is the sort of feature I want in MOST software. Once upon a time, I had a bookmark manager in Firefox that worked like you could select multiple tags and only see the intersection of them while applying additional filtering. I really wish I remembered which one it was so that I could point to it as an example, but I just want it back almost as badly as I want things like Sunrise.

Recurring theme: better use of what you’ve got already. In this case, I might just want to do that static site search engine thing, though. I mean, that’s probably close enough. Maybe that just goes on my backlog of things to do here.

better ebook software + metadata

This is a recent complaint, thanks to Calibre going all in on AI and Kavita… well, it’s Fine. No disrespect meant, as far as everything I’ve tried goes, Kavita is probably the best hostable cbz/cbr reader out there. Every update absolutely makes it better. But…

The issue is that comics and manga suck for being something you can write metadata around. Most of the blame lies with Marvel and DC, since I don’t know that anyone responsible for numbering series issues at either publisher actually can count, but not all of it. ComicRack, ComicInfoXML, and even the newest attempt with Metron (which is trying way too hard to maintain compatibility) are all just woefully inadequate for properly representing books – and the solution isn’t epub’s metadata, either. That stuff is more like a collection of namespaces that sort of work together if you wish really hard. Some of this blame just lies with metadata sources, too, since ComicVine counts each individual trade paperback as a new series when it comes to most comics, leading to “Nailbiter Returns, Part 2” being issue 2 of “Nailbiter Returns” but also volume 9 of the “Nailbiter” series.

That’s the problem. I want to be able to have reading orders. I want to be able to group works together more reliably, I want to be able to have better tracking of what issues are in what, I want top-level metadata for things that don’t change across a series necessarily (age rating, genre) that can be overridden if necessary. I want to be able to do clean filtering of genres, themes. I want tags and genres to be able to be grouped together, so that I don’t need to specify “Fantasy” and “Dark Fantasy” or “Urban Fantasy” every time, just they get included and could just as easily be left out. Subtags like “romance descriptors” wouldn’t be clogging up the full tag list, either, so there wouldn’t be some AO3 style nightmare (affectionate) of browsing through a bunch of tags that are just silly to see without others.

Calibre and Calibre-web are.. fine, at their core. If they hadn’t gone in on AI crap, I probably wouldn’t consider much when it comes to them. But Calibre-web doesn’t really do “series” level views or groupings, not well, its permissions suck, and to be charitable the interface looks like open source software from the 90s. Okay, that’s not particularly charitable. The usability just sucks. They put tables with generated columns on a page and expect it to be functional for management. The settings pages are a mess and feel completely unorganized. It’s way harder to read something online in it than it should be, everyhing about it’s way too particular about where things are stored on your disk so it’s easy to end up with duplicates, and honestly it’s just really tempermental to keep the connection for Calibre-web working since it also runs off your standalone Calibre installation’s database, which also means you can’t easily manage it on a server without just copying things around and… scream. Scream, that’s all there is to it. It makes me want to scream.

I know this is a huge undertaking and the sort of software that if I were to be the one to get started on it, I would need to do an industry-wide change almost to get the work I want done. That’s where being able to map and take in the existing formats comes in, with robust support for exporting data in the format I want. As long as my viewer is decent enough for web viewing and can write a compatibility content.opf for e-readers to understand, I don’t think I would actually have to take the world by storm to get something usable.