In my day to day activities I often find myself wishing I could go into the source code of something and change it so that it was more intuitive or to add a feature which would be easy to implement, but for some reason was never added.
What are some projects you wish you could contribute to but haven't or can't?
Highest on my list is my university's student services web-app. The interface is horribly clunky and any simple task requires 20 more steps than it should.
Microsoft Visio! So much potential, no real competitors but such a slow, crowded, mazed and unintuitive user-interface :(
stackoverflow.com
Not so much because it's complex interesting code, but because I'd love to have access to mine the data and add certain features.
Highest on my list is my university's student services web-app. The interface is horribly clunky and any simple task requires 20 more steps than it should.
I'm with you on that. My university's web-app has security holes, in addition to being usability-challenged. I've been writing up proof-of-concept code to show the flaws, and hopefully get it fixed.
Also on my list:
There are actually quite a few more projects that I want to do that involve C, which is a huge motivation for learning it, even if I don't particularly like programming in it. I've never really had the urge to help out in a closed-source app. They don't seem nearly as welcoming.
Eclipse.
I build plugins and RCP apps all the time, but the selection process, and bureaucracy behind contributing to the main IDE itself is not terribly friendly (in my experiences).
Firefox.
There are so many cool plugins and add-ons, but to be honest I lack the time and experience (and it wouldn't really fit into my work needs).
Windows menus and UI - because a lot of them was not modified since the release and, it's sometimes about NT 4.0 ! It's awful.
Windows system MMC consoles - because a lot of them are not equal in common places. Context menus, clicking behavior, so on.
Far Manager - because it's current project manager is a boor, unfortunately.