It's the first of April, which means two things! One, you should believe even fewer things you read online than usual. And two, the historic first ever OFFLine FIRst SOftware CHallenge has now drawn to a close. I had no idea what sort of uptake to expect for this new challenge, given that it necessarily targets a smaller audience (not everybody who phlogs/gemlogs also codes), but I am happy to report that OFFLFIRSOCH was welcomed with enthusiasm despite the awful name! I am aware of a total of twelve submisions. If I have missed or forgotten your submission, please reach out to me! EDIT: Now up to thirteen!
I am really, really trying (and mostly failing) to spend the bare minimum amount of time at the computer this Easter long weekend, so here is a simple link dump to all the OFFLFIRSOCH entries that I know of, in alphabetical order of author's name/handle. A proper ROOPHLOCH-style archive section of my capsule will appear in the very near future, as well as a slightly more detailed summary post with some thoughts and observations (and if you haven't heard anything back to your submission email yet, that will happen too, I promise!).
EDIT on 2024-04-02: Whoomp, here it is! The OFFLFIRSOCH archive section, that is.
Thanks to everybody who participated and made OFFLFIRSOCH 2024 a success! I'm already looking forward to next year's challenge.
New sundog Bandali wrote a time and date converter with some nice interfaces
Eoin wrote a tool to estimate distance, flight time and carbon cost of flying certain routes
Frank Seifferth wrote a PDF combiner
The Free Thinker wrote a (technically qualifying!) tool to track their data usage
Matto used the recutils tool to replace Goodreads, then deleted their account!
Matograine wrote a tool for URL en/decoding from the command line
Morgana wrote a rot13 en/decoder and substitution cipher breaker
Olivier modified their existing Go module documentation tool to make it useful offline
Rmgr wrote a random journal prompt provider
Screwtape wrote a tool for storing MOO game room states as LISP structs
Solderpunk wrote a tool for checking times in and distances between cities
EDIT on 2024-05-03: degrowther published at the end of April the code for their "foodscale" tool which was started as an OFFLFIRSOCH project but wasn't completed before the deadline. That doesn't mean it's not a cool bit of offline first software, though!