Nyxt is facing a critical period. Currently, the project is trying to achieve financial sustainability. You can read more about our efforts here: Sustainable Open Source.
In addition to building applications for normal users, we’d also like to
consider building applications for businesses. Thus, we would like to ask for your help in the identification of potential opportunities!
1 - In your opinion, which industries could benefit the most from tailor-made applications built on top of Nyxt?
Web scraping companies
Cryptocurrencies companies
Social media companies
Web development companies
Other (please comment below)
0voters
2 - A Nyxt application could be useful for the products, services, or co-workers of a specific company. Can you think of a single company that could benefit from a tailor-made application made on top of Nyxt? If so, which one would that be?
I am personally strongly in favor of web scraping technologies. If we improve our ability to understand the content of pages, we can improve the experience for both businesses, and users.
There are a fair number of tools that are essentially business front-ends to social media platforms (buffer, tweetdeck etc). Customisable versions of these may have an appeal. You should also talk to Mitch Stoltz at EFF — I know there is a small coalition of folks trying to make sure that that kind of scraping isn’t chilled by baseless legal threats, and I think they would both love your model — it’s just part of what a user agent browser does! — and maybe have suggestions about who to talk to.
Also maybe worth hitting up some of the Lisp-using businesses and see if they have a use and/or might want to fund or otherwise support development. I’m thinking like a Lisp GUI toolkit that works in-browser, and/or a packaged Electron-equivalent for distributing Lisp tools.
Are you familiar with the Memex extension from Worldbrain? I feel like the programmability of Nyxt makes it perfect for power-user knowledge workers. It could (for example) easily become an integration layer “workspace” around a bunch of cloud services/portals that people use through the browser. This would also (hopefully) keep the direction of Nyxt close to the initial vision, rather than distracting to a completely different direction…
For some of the applications you mention (eg: scraping), you’d have to have a strong value proposition of what people cannot solve with automation-friendly browser/crawling/scraping technology that is already being used all over the place.
I have no problem with a monthly donation my self. Currently working through the economics of various things to set aside a monthly donation amount.
I don’t have a specific idea about what kind of application would benefit being built on top of Nyxt. In the web world, the interface is delivered to the render engine dynamically and every website is technically and application built “on top” of a browser.
I guess the question that I need to think about is which kinds of local applications would be well served by Nyxt providing the render engine framework around which to deploy the application.
Indeed, and what I find myself leaning towards next would be some sort of mail reader. I understand for a business application it will be almost impossible to get people away from MS Outlook.
However, for a PIM type system, I can see the mail reader integrating nicely and working well, handling HTML emails especially.
Happened to check back in after a long hiatus (still using Nyxt, just disconnected from a lot for a bit) and saw this and noticed it didn’t seem anyone was thinking what I was.
Have you at all considered that Nyxt itself is the application? I get the appeal of making a one and done (minus updates of course) kind of application for Nyxt but why not think of Nyxt as the Business Application itself? I understand that with the current idea you can just make something at let companies/people buy it over and over again buuuuuuut just work directly with the businesses.
Nyxt is incredibly powerful as we all know but with that come some intricacies that not everyone has an easy solution for. But plenty of companies have very very talented and smart people that can wrap their minds around it even if they don’t build it all out from scratch as it were. I’m thinking of people like me. I love it, but as you noticed months back I was asking A LOT of questions and getting a lot of help and feedback. Don’t you think companies would find it valuable that you build them out what is essentially their own browser (because seriously it would be that) that they could then fine tune and tweak over time? I can do that all day, had you all wanted some of the same things that I wanted you could have done in minutes what took me hours to do. And I would have happily paid you to take my ideas and turn it into something that I can tweak myself down the road if needed.
This can be turned into something else as well where (I have seen it happen before first hand) you get with the right company(ies) and they end up donating a significant amount to you with no strings because they see what you did for them and see the future in the project and don’t want it to fizzle out. Anyway I’m getting ahead of myself and Nyxt here but I really do think you could manage to turn this into something a lot bigger for all of us if you go forward with the idea that Nyxt is already your big idea and it can be a lot bigger with the right customization on your part.
TL;DR
Create Nyxt Pro/Enterprise, keep everything open-source like you are and find the right partners. Build a company a solution that fits the workflows they want people in their company to have. I believe the biggest learning curve to Nyxt ir what happens right out of the gate with all the customizations and what it takes to do so. Work with IT in a company and customize the crap out of it so that by the time it gets to their users they can use it no problem and it makes their jobs easier. IT already have solutions in place that could easily distribute all configs you create to all users and allow them to change and manage it all easily.
However, for a PIM type system, I can see the mail reader integrating nicely and working well, handling HTML emails especially.
Definitely a powerful idea. If you can pull it off, integrating email+PIM (basically org like ergonomic workflow, but in a browser, so supporting better "views" of content than just what emacs supports), I'm guessing a lot of power users might be interested in paying for it (finding enough of them and getting them to pay might be a different challenge).
PS, if you do decide to build out an email client, it might be worth building it as a frontend for notmuch; that will give a flexible+fast workflow for free, complementary to the end-user interface and email rendering.
A very fascinating strategy. I have been meditating upon it since you posted. I have considered it, but was frequently discouraged by the challenge of scaling such a business! Perhaps there is a way. Thank you for sharing your thoughts!
I have also thought about what it might mean for LEM to be embedded in NYXT. I love my terminal based ide but it might be interesting to take LEM and give it some Visual Studio Code kind of treatment.
What might it mean for NYXT to be a client that ships with CLOG as an ide where LEM + a whole bunch of tools are built for a web based ide as per Symbolics question in the forums here: Only WebApps? · Discussion #81 · rabbibotton/clog · GitHub
While there is a tension between NYXT the browser integrating something like LEM / CLOG and CLOG just being a frontend ui serving thin interfaces to whatever browser is interested in consuming them, you guys may have just accidentally invented the core of something like Jupyter.
I would second that as well. There are NO mail readers that I like at all. I just end up using the Roundcube interfaces provided by hosting companies and calling it a day.
In fact, part of the reason I am following NYXT is to automate a bunch of things like logins to multiple accounts and have them available as tabs or buffers or something that is simultaneously usable via mouse and kb.
If I could have a single web interface for all of the email accounts, that would be really nice.
The only caution about PIM stuff is that it is a lot of work and it is a totally boring project that requires maintenance. Thunderbird is awful, I do know that there is a huge number of people that want an alternative but I don’t know how many people might pay or do a monthly crowdfunding thing for it.
Okay, this is an amazing idea. As responded to by others, this is a very exciting idea.
In fact, part of why I am following NYXT so that I can programmatically interact with online resources in a single emacs style environment (and it is awesome, you guys have long ago surpassed Conqueror) and a single (my favourite language).
Potential applications for this. Bookmark sync, rss sync, bookmark to webpage hosting ‘for Firefox etc…’
With bookmarks Nyxt does not have a way for syncing bookmarks. Nyxt is relying on the user to do this, which it makes very easy to do by using files which allows you to use tools like git for this:). What would be nice to have some more defined ways of doing this.
Doing this with git
Using a Nyxt sync service with a code snippet for your Nyxt config to do the syncing
1 Instructions to self host the syncing service, but you will have to get a server to run
2 $$ Offer paid hosting using default hosting name for people who do not want to or can’t set up a syncing server.
This would also be beneficial for your rss reader Demeter and email reader
One of the big benefits I see with Nyxt applications is
1st class support for keyboard
1st class support for filtering
1st class support for extending
1st class support for customization
I really apprecite your focus on “Towards Open Source Sustainability” and bringing ever
Towards Open Source Sustainability
Another idea could be a cms like ghost but with focus on keyboards or integrating with your editor "Emacs, vi, or one built into Nyxt. Between wordpress and static site generators I am not sure if there is anything in this space with a focus on the above
However one thing you do not get is are these applications on mobile. Hosting a sync service for Demeter that also has a webpage or android app to see your feeds “with a read state to take advantage of the syncing service” would make Demeter a much more robust rss solution. This would also apply to an email reader
If you want access to your feeds while the go you don’t have to set up another feed reader on mobile and keep them in sync manually.
Use full advantage of desktops for content display, filtering, keyboard, extending while still being able to use it while you are at your desktop
If you extend your feed reader you can make use of them on mobile. Buttons for stuff like saved searches like notmuch.el
Sharing bookmarks with others
Maintaining bookmarks with multiple people? ex your partner or businesses
clog jacl could be useful common lisp libraries for porting some of the stuff to mobile or websites for non-Nyxt usage.
This could allow somebody to make a pim app that uses Nyxt annotations, email “not made yet” and rss “Demeter” integration. Using this in conjunction and a cms would allow you to pipeline your notes into posts for your blog or evergreen notes. Syncing server would be nice for working from multiple devices. Website Hosting could be useful for posting content https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Evergreen_notes
This would also allow more of your work to be open source:)
