DonationCoder.com Software > N.A.N.Y. 2016

Idea Thread for NANY 2016

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mouser:
If anyone has any ideas to suggest for NANY 2016, or collaborations they want to work on, etc. -- feel free to use this thread (or start a new one starting with NANY2016 idea).
Remember that NANY ideas should typically be small in scope -- not year long projects.

mouser:
One of the truly TERRIBLE ideas in recent versions of windows is that icons in the system tray are BY DEFAULT set to hide unless they produce a message.
This can frequently (for me at least) lead to me having programs running in the background that I didn't realize were still running.
The option to hide icons is great.  The default behavior is not.

It might be nice to have a program that changed the system setting to always show icons for newly discovered apps.  That is, the utility would run in the background, and the first time it encounters a new exe running, it would check registry for an entry saying to hide the icon, and change that to say to show the icon.  If the user goes so system tray options and chooses to hide it in the future, there will be no effect, as this app is only modifying the setting the first time an app is seen.

IainB:
IDEA: OCR - create a common OCR module or plugin for CHS (ClipboardHelp&Spell) and SC (ScreenshotCaptor)
...possibly using the OCR code provided by Microsoft for $free ...

Some related DonationCoderForum posts:

* Feature request: automatic OCR of captured images. | DCF (2014-11-24)

* Feature Request: Search text notes in screenshots ... | DCF (2013-03-14)

* IDEA: OCR & paste | DCF (2008-09-18)

* Re: Microsoft OneNote - Office Lens for iPhone and Android phones | DCF (2015-09-24)


Some related web references:

* Quick Tip: How to Search for Text Inside an Image } EverNote.com
* About Optical Character Recognition in Google Drive | Google (answers)
* Windows 8.1 now searches text within photos thanks to... | TheVerge.com
* Extract text from pictures and file printouts by using OCR in... | Office.com
* Free Online OCR - Convert JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, TIFF, PDF  |  NewOCR.com
* "Hosted Microsoft OCR library": Free OCR API web service | Autonomous Technology (a9t9)
* FREE OCR software: a survey of desktop and online tools... | FreewareGenius.com
Open the floodgates!   :)

ewemoa:
Some folks have been noticing that over the years, various apps appear to "phone home" from time to time.

For example, Firefox seems to contact a variety of locations -- they do provide some info about this and often how to disable:

  http://kb.mozillazine.org/Connections_established_on_startup_-_Firefox
  https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-making-automatic-connections
  https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/755147
  https://superuser.com/questions/832608/what-is-being-send-to-received-from-safebrowsing-google-com-when-i-open-firefo
  https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1076594

but there does not appear to be a single preference one can select to disable all such behavior (or alternatively, turn stuff off temporarily and restore later).  Also it turns out in some cases it's a plug-in (e.g. IIUC, NoScript may talk to secure.informaction.com -- please point out if this is incorrect).

I also noticed that at some point one of the tracking related settings had gotten enabled here :(  In general, I'm not too happy about settings changing behind my back...

So this leads to an idea...

A policy-checking / reporting plug-in or app -- perhaps at first for FF, but may be also for other apps.  A rough idea of it is to be able to specify a policy (e.g. no non-user initiated connections) and then get a report on whether it's followed and perhaps to warn when the policy appears to be violated.  Being able to load / save various policies might be nice too.

I realize that doing this in detail is likely to be a fair bit of work -- was just thinking something simple might be possible to gain a fair bit of benefit.  Perhaps something that just checks a certain set of settings -- not actually try to monitor app behavior.

May be such a thing exists already, but if not... :)

ewemoa:
Just tried out qemu-launcher:

  https://screenshots.debian.net/screenshots/q/qemu-launcher/14020_large.png

Part of what it does is provide a GUI for creating / editing sets of information for launching the qemu emulator.

Was thinking that a general GUI tool to do this sort of thing for any command line program (i.e. rather than specifically just for one program) could be handy.

Perhaps one could provide (for each supported command line program) a template describing options, corresponding GUI layout, and how what's specified gets translated into command line parameters.  A motivated user might provide / share their own templates.

IIUC, some of this is done by Drag and Drop Robot -- the creating / editing sets of information part at least.


Insert usual comment about if suitable thing doesn't exist already :)

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