Unlike the other guys, I’m not creative at all. Not an artistic cell in my body. I’m a man of science, dry humor, and sarcasm, so I consider myself amongst great minds with the finalists in the dreamapp contest, and hope I hold up. I submitted two ideas on a whim, and was concerned what the masses would think, so never got involved in the board, as is normal for me. My modus operandi is to lurk, and watch, until I feel I know people enough to post.
Well, surprise. I’m a finalist. Time to get social.
Anyway, there’s a guy in this chat I frequent, and he always has garden pictures. 72 pound of tomatoes, Pumpkins as big as cars, what have you. He invariably ends up sending the picture 10 times, as it would have been too much of a pain to set up a HTML route somewhere for the file. Thus the idea of Chatboard was born. Idly, I speculated for months before the contest, that maybe I should dust off my C knowledge, and check what it would take to code this.
The phone rang yesterday, ending all that (hopefully). I do think that if coded, the app could be used as Groupware for the Rest of Us, to coin a phrase. If you chat socially or professionally, one-click publishing to a shared, protected space can help express yourself without having to figure out who’s got an isight, who can’t receive files because of a firewall, or even who’s at the keys.
I have a whole community to thank, and I’ll get to that later. For now, thanks to the judges who looked at the idea, and for you for reading this as long as you have. I do have a lot to say about the application, and I’m very excited to have gotten this far!
-MW
