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Discussion on: Where do you get ideas for side projects?

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xowap profile image
Rémy 🤖

Oh my. Everywhere. It's the time I don't find.

From every problem that you encounter as a user (an app that does X or Y) or a developer (a lib to simplify recurring tasks) to abstract things that help you understand concepts (oh let's create a compression algorithm).

Free idea: an app to copy/paste anything securely from a computer to another.

  1. You drop things (text, files, ...) into a box in the app
  2. You pack everything, this gives you a QR-code. Everything is encrypted client-side.
  3. Scan the QR-code with your phone. It contains the content ID and decryption key.
  4. Open the app on another computer and set it to "receive"
  5. Scan the QR-code of the second computer. It contains a public key generated by the client to receive the content of the other QR-code
  6. The phone sends the information through web sockets via the app server to the second computer, all encrypted with the scanned public key.
  7. The second computer now has de decryption key and the content ID, it downloads it, decrypts it and lets the user download it
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idoshamun profile image
Ido Shamun

I once developed something similar but less secure.
I called it Firepaste, you could copy-paste from your computer to mobile or vice-versa.