Show HN: Ishim – find available one-word domain names

Hi guys, I developed a tool to check and find domain names and have been using it for some time. Now, I put them into an application (for MacOS at the moment).<p>This Domain Tool can help you:<p>- Find one-word names (support English, Spanish, Dutch, and French)<p>- Bulk check those names with the flexible option with extensions<p>Available for MacOS, Windows and Linux<p>Why a desktop app? I used some name suggestion web app and someday, they just went offline or disappear.<p>Hope you find it useful. Feedback and question are welcome

Before anyone makes another comment about how and why this should be a webapp….<p>The author has answered and stated multiple time here that the reason he made this a local app is because if the website that the tool is hosted on is down or gone, then you are dead out of water.<p>That’s why he made a local tool.<p>And no, the tool does not still rely on some application&#x2F;webserver. He has stated that it only requires reaching out to the Whois servers.<p><i>note</i> I used “he” but probably should have used “they” as I have no idea on the gender identification of the author. What is the proper way to just use “the author” in place of he&#x2F;she&#x2F;they?

An alternative for researching domain names is to apply for TLD zone file access. &quot;Trying to find a one word domain name,&quot; is unlikely to be an acceptable reason for access, though.<p>I applied (and received access on my second attempt) about a decade ago for .com access. Among other things, I ran a check for any words in my spellcheck dictionary that were not already taken as .com domains. There is a reason for all the silly spellings in domain names today; I don&#x27;t recall the first words that were available, but they were not short nor desirable for a domain name. There were also no 3 alphanumeric ascii character domain names left, at the time.<p>I applied through Verisign. But, they are currently directing folks to apply via ICAN directly.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.verisign.com&#x2F;en_US&#x2F;channel-resources&#x2F;domain-registry-products&#x2F;zone-file&#x2F;index.xhtml" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.verisign.com&#x2F;en_US&#x2F;channel-resources&#x2F;domain-regi...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;czds.icann.org&#x2F;home" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;czds.icann.org&#x2F;home</a>

Hate to dogpile on this but why the app?<p>Not trying to hate on you, genuinely curious why you chose this route. Sometimes using the tools you are most comfortable with at the time is the path to the highest short term productivity.

Unimportant but it is a bit misleading coming from a Linux browser to only see Download for Windows &amp; Mac call-to-actions. I thought it was incompatible before I saw the top right penguin. You might wanna use the User-Agent to show a more relevant CTA.

As an aside. How do you get design-chops like that?<p>Can it be learned, or are these people just born with a flair for picking styles that work well universally?

Mental note (after reading tons of Show HN), if I ever release an Electron app, the submission title must be preemptive and include the phrase &quot;<i>I don&#x27;t care about your whines, if you want a native app you&#x27;re free to start writing it right now, meanwhile this exists at all thanks to Electron, not despite of it</i>&quot; suffix!

This is cool. Never seen the local application take before. I&#x27;d be interested to know how people respond to having a dedicated app and if they enjoy that UX more than a website.<p>In a similar vein, but more focused around finding similar sounding names or creating a mashup of two words is Mashword (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mashword.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mashword.com</a>). We&#x27;re working on improving performance and reducing noise in the result set, but if you are patient, then even in its current incarnation, it produces some novel results.

Congrats on shipping and thanks for sharing with us! I&#x27;m going to try it, as recently the good old &quot;impossibility dot org&quot; (don&#x27;t try that, it&#x27;s NSFW now) went offline.

After a few tests it looks good but it reports some domains as registered when they are not (for instance kostikaable.com or kostikaition.io are marked registered but do not seem to exist when I manually run a Whois). Maybe the tool is running onto some rate limiting thresholds?<p>Also when there are a lot of domains to check you could check them in parallel, otherwise it gets quite slow to wait for the results (but that might be an inherent limitation of the Whois servers).

To the people complaining about this being an app instead of a tool in a browser: This is a Show HN and someone made something for free and shared it.<p>Maybe they just wanted to play around with Electron, they don&#x27;t owe you anything.

It looks interesting and I really do like this. But in a world of ransomware, I am not going to install any software on my machine just because it looks interesting.<p>I know I am echoing half of the other comments here, but this does really need to be a webapp.

I like the idea, and would use the service, as the domain is short and memorable. But, this is a low hanging fruit for HN critics, the argument of: &quot;is an app so I dont have to worry about a website being down&quot; is pretty poor, you can host your website assets on Netlify&#x2F;aws amplify&#x2F;firebase&#x2F;.... many more.... , with close to 99.99 % availability. And also provide an electron app for those who prefer to use an app. I wish you luck, and I hope we get a site, I like your service.

This website design is baffling on mobile. It is so difficult to see what is going on.

- How do we know the search results are not hijacked&#x2F;registered ? - How do we know the queries are not sold as a database ? - How do we know if and&#x2F;or what third parties are involved ? - Which jurisdiction are we talking about? ( Does GDPR apply? )

Is this another electron app? Why? This is 100% doable in the browser and has been done before with other sites. Why do I need to spend 300MiB of ram to search for domain names?<p>Sorry to sound negative, it&#x27;s just... the electron fad is getting really old.

So why not a website with an opened-sourced git so it can&#x27;t &quot;go offline&quot; ?<p>Was there any other motivations to go electron, maybe to learn idk

&quot;TLDs&quot;, not &quot;extensions&quot;. I wince when I see the latter, similar (but not the same) as when people say &quot;backslash&quot; when referring to ordinary solidus.<p>The great domainsfortherestofus.com used to exist, but seems to have gone offline in the last couple of months.