Online White Board – Create an application which allows you and friends to collaborate on a white board online. Draw pictures, write notes and use various colors to flesh out ideas for projects. For added complexity try building in picture tubes.
Bandwidth Monitor – A small utility program that tracks how much data you have uploaded and downloaded from the net during the course of your current online session. See if you can find out what periods of the day you use more and less and generate a report or graph that shows it.
Bookmark Collector and Sorter – An application that you can put online for people to upload bookmarks to, have it sort them, remove duplicates and export the entire list as a Firefox/IE/Safari bookmark file. For added complexity see if you can group the bookmark items into various folders.
Password Safe – A program which keeps track of passwords for sites or applications and encrypts them with a key so that no one can read them.
Media Player Widget for iGoogle – Create an iGoogle gadget which can play various song lists from your computer as well as share one song daily. Perhaps let people look up which songs you have listened to lately.
Text Based Game Like Utopia – Create a simple text based RPG like Utopia where you can create a civilization, gather resources, forge alliances, cast spells and more on a turn based system. See if you can dominate the kingdom.
Scheduled Auto Login and Action – Make an application which logs into a given site on a schedule and invokes a certain action and then logs out. This can be useful for checking web mail, posting regular content, or getting info for other applications and saving it to your computer.
E-Card Generator – Make a site that allows people to generate their own little e-cards and send them to other people. Can use flash or not. Use a picture library and perhaps insightful mottos or quotes.
Content Management System – Create a content management system (CMS) like Joomla, Drupal, PHP Nuke etc. Start small and allow for the addition of modules/addons later.
Template Maker – Make a site or application which allows the user to enter in various color codes, elements, dimensions and constructs a template file for a particular application like PHPBB, Invision Board, MySpace, Bebo, etc.
CAPTCHA Maker – Ever see those images with letters a numbers when you signup for a service and then asks you to enter what you see? It keeps web bots from automatically signing up and spamming. Try creating one yourself for online forms. If you use PHP, take a look at the image functions of GD.
Files
Quiz Maker – Make an application which takes various questions form a file, picked randomly, and puts together a quiz for students. Each quiz can be different and then reads a key to grade the quizzes.
Quick Launcher – A utility program that allows the user to assign various programs to icons on a toolbar. Then by clicking the buttons they can quickly launch the programs with parameters etc. Much like Windows quick launch.
File Explorer – Create your own windows explorer program but with added features, better searching, new icons and other views.
Sort File Records Utility – Reads a file of records, sorts them, and then writes them back to the file. Allow the user to choose various sort style and sorting based on a particular field.
Add Transactions In File and Find Averages – Read in a file of financial transactions, group them into accounts, add up fields or find averages or apply credits and debits to each account.
Create Zip File Maker – The user enters various files from different directories and maybe even another computer on the network and the program transfers them and zips them up into a zip file. For added complexity, apply actual compression to the files.
PDF Generator – An application which can read in a text file, html file or some other file and generates a PDF file out of it. Great for a web based service where the user uploads the file and the program returns a PDF of the file.
Bulk Renamer and Organizer – This program will take a series of files and renames them with a specific filename filter entered by the user. For instance if the user enters myimage###.jpg it will rename all files with a “minimum” of three numbers like “myimage001.jpg”, “myimage145.jpg” or even “myimage1987.jpg” since 1987 has at least three numbers.
Mp3 Tagger – Modify and add ID3v1 tags to MP3 files. See if you can also add in the album art into the MP3 file’s header as well as other ID3v2 tags.
Log File Maker – Make an application which logs various statistics in response to given events. This can be something that logs what an application does, what the system is doing, when something like a file changes etc.
Excel Spreadsheet Exporter – Create an online application which can read in a file and create an Excel Spreadsheet to export back. This can be through CVS or other file formats. For added complexity, see if you can create formula fields as well.