- John (Minerva):
- Blog
- My Idea
- About Me
- Judge's Comments
Round 3
Having all your correspondence available in a central location would be an amazing thing, especially if it was quick to access and find the information you were looking for. However with all this functionality, it’s going to be quite a challenge to keep the overall interface clean and functional.
Round 2
This idea sounds intriguing to me especially the vision behind it. But I think it’s not feasible at the moment. You need to aggregate information from several data sources probably held by various app which often don’t let you get to their data that easily. You could go the other route and tap the different data sources yourself presenting them in your own unique interface and make relations between them. Then you have the problem that you either have redundant configurations and apps for the same kind of data or you just stick with the new one. Leopard would probably lower the barrier to make this happen. But while I’m fascinated by the vision behind it I think we’re not there yet.
I guess someone had to make the iStyleIt idea look easy. I find myself once again damning Shipley for having already written almost everything I want to say in these reviews. Here’s yet another impediment to Minerva nirvana. This idea touches too many application domains already staked out by much larger, better funded, more experienced players who have no motivation to help a third party integrate and subsume their functionality. Sure, we all want such a thing, but it’s way too ambitious. Hell, you might as well ask for a non-sucky Finder.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could click on a contact in your Address Book and see all the emails you sent to and received from this person?
Round 1
How cool is this? Lots of Leopard technologies have changed this idea from something I wish could exist into something I want done, now. With system-wide To Do support, RSS classes and VoiceOver, Minerva has suddenly become not only feasible, but potentially killer app quality. It could truly change the way I interact with my Mac. I’d love to wake up each morning, and while browsing the web, have Minerva report to me what I have to do, what appointments are coming up, and important emails that have come in. Or have Minerva’s morning report playing on my iPod while walking to classes. Here’s hoping this finalist goes far.
I’ve seen this idea too many times. The problem with making a all-in-one application is you have to get everything right or it sucks. I’ve never even seen a mail client that people can agree is the best, how would you write a mail/calendar/rss/what-have-you program that’s better than all the individual solutions right now? Aren’t you just replacing what should be the desktop’s function?
Time to put this one to bed. It hasn’t gotten fleshed out much over the past few weeks, which doesn’t give me great hope for the future.
It’s totally possible to implement it in the limited form described by the contestant, but between the lack of excitement for this idea on the forums, and the lack of excitement generated by the contestant, it’s not something I’d want to work on.