We've heard from a few community members that they'd like to participate in the Wheel Reinvention Jam, but don't have a project idea in mind.
First of all, consider teaming up with someone from the jam ideas thread or the community Discord server. Some project ideas are big enough that they might need a team of people to do them justice!
But alternatively, if you want to go it on your own, here is a curated list of projects we think might be a good starting point. Some are larger than others, but for each one we've tried to find an angle on it that we think is both interesting and doable in a week.
If any of these sound interesting to you, please let us know! We'll put your name by that entry so that we don't have multiple people working on the same thing.
Casual video editing software.
Popular video editing programs these days are huge, incredibly complex, and often built for professional workflows that are far beyond the reach of most users. Most of the time, something far simpler would suffice, and would be a lot nicer to use. And often these programs are slow and crashy, burdened by all their features.
Windows Movie Maker is dead. iMovie exists, but is Mac-only and kind of stagnant. There is a void to be filled here.
To restrict the scope of the project, consider limiting the file types you support, and heavily use ffmpeg behind the scenes.
Math / general typesetting software.
The typesetting world is dominated by LaTeX. But anyone who's used LaTeX knows what an absolute mess it is. Syntax is inconsistent, features are fractured across various incompatible packages, and in general, things that should be simple...are not.
And it's not just math typesetting that suffers from this; LaTeX is also one of the best tools for general document typesetting. The world deserves a system that's more thoughtfully designed.
To start a project like this, perhaps you could simply focus on math typesetting, and take inspiration from decent equation editors like Desmos.
File versioning / backup / history systems.
As programmers we are likely all used to tools like Git or Subversion, which are specifically designed to work with code. But most computer users don't work with code.
In general, it seems like we should be able to work with a filesystem like a normal human being, but also have some history capabilities on top of that. Maybe I want to see what this specific file looked like a week ago. Maybe I want to see what the entire contents of this folder looked like a week ago.
Most PC backup programs don't do a good job of exposing backup data in a way that is nice for users to access. Time Machine for Mac arguably does - in the silliest way possible. And it's Mac-only.
There are any number of ways this could be done. You could even have optional "commits" if that made sense. There's lots of design space to explore on this one.
Vector graphics editors.
I hardly need to say much about this one - Adobe Illustrator is an expensive subscription program, and Inkscape is terrible.
There is enormous room for improvement in the vector editing space, especially when we consider much of what vector graphics are used for day-to-day. Yes, some people will be doing fancy graphic design and visual art. But a bunch of people are just making icons.
Many people would be happy to use a vector graphics editor that can do simple lines, strokes, fills, and gradients. The ability to export to SVG or to rasterize to various sizes would fulfill a lot of use cases, especially for web development. And libraries exist for rendering SVG data, which could give you a head start.
Also, may this tweet provide inspiration.
RSS reader.
RSS is great. It actually lives up to its name - it really is a simple way of fetching content from all over the internet, curated just the way you like it.
And yet, hardly anyone uses it any more. Google Reader died years ago, and with it a major way of consuming content on the internet. It has been mostly replaced, very badly, by Twitter and social media in general. This sucks. We should have a great, simple RSS app that is easy for anyone to use, syncs content between multiple devices, and doesn't do exploitative stuff.
And remember when I said no one uses RSS any more? I lied. Kind of. Podcasts use RSS as well, with just a few simple extensions to the format. People consume podcasts all the time, and a hybrid news / podcast app sounds like a killer combination.
(For an example of a good modern RSS reader, see Miniflux - but it needs to be self-hosted, which makes it a no-go for most people.)
Quick on-the-fly drawing program that copies straight to your clipboard.
Wouldn't this be great? It would be like a screenshot program, except instead of a screenshot it just pops up a quick temporary drawing canvas for you, and when you close it, it could just drop the image right onto your clipboard. This would just be such a great little utility to have. And most similar programs are really focused on screenshots.
And finally, if none of those spark your interest, captainkraft pointed us to this list of Arch Linux applications, which is wonderfully comprehensive. Scan through that list and see if anything catches your eye!