Hacker News Reader

≥ "If this tool a) was updated regularly b) had a nicer, non-CLI UI for everyday users and c) was available at an easily-Googlable domain name - it would solve all the problems I mentioned above."

No matter how nice you make it, it will probably still lose the SEO battle against the shitty ad-ladden sites fighting to win top place for google searches of "convert X to mp3"/etc.

View on HN

That's probably true. In my ideal world, the OSS community comes together in a suite of offline-first, in-browser alternatives to common user needs. We need a site for document conversion (using WASM Pandoc?), PDF merging, image conversion, text utils (lower case, spell check). All these would live on one trusted site. Hopefully users can discover the site and be done searching, and spread its name by word of mouth.

I had to merge a bunch of PDFs for a rental application recently and it was painful. Having to upload very sensitive docs, every site being a funnel to their paid version, etc.

In the past I've used ghostscript to merge PDFs, but it's not user friendly of course. I do like your idea of one site hosting these sort of FOSS utilities with nice wrappers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com