My Dream App

Well, the finalists have been selected and judging is almost underway. Things are moving fast and are finally starting to heat up. There are a lot of good ideas in this pool of 24, and I’m confident they will result in 3 beautiful apps

I have found in going through these ideas that it takes a lot more than an initial read through to truly understand the potential of an idea. When you look at an idea like Destinations, it doesn’t jump out at you. But then when you start thinking about it… it just might.

An app that lets you make a travel log. Great. Immediately you think of an iTunes style interface with a sidebar indicating “trips” then a detailed view of each trip with a list of places. Screw that, master-detail list based UIs are so cliche and boring these days. Try a full on simplified world view. Beautiful CoreAnimation rendered vector images of all of the continents. You click one, it zooms in. Drag a push pin into a country, you get a little diary page to write notes and drag in photos from iPhoto. Click and hold from one country to another and you can start forming your trip. I could totally imagine planning out your trip a week before, supplying a general map and time frame of your travels, then, after you start traveling, Destinations could switch to a “timeline” view that lets you update your log with full iLife integration. When you get back from your trip, a slew of web templates could make it easy to publish your trip.

That sounds way better, but you could take it a step further. What if you’re more spontaneous and don’t have everything planned out? Say you take a trip to a city in Europe. You want to go somewhere else but you have no idea what to do… open up Destinations, select the pushpin that indicates your current location, and click the “tell me where I can go for $x button.” Destinations could use Google Maps and other services to calculate a random place to go to next based on your budget. It sounds crazy, but people love crazy stuff, and innovating is the only way an app like this is going to stand out.

I’m just throwing out some ideas here to show how fun it can be to start fleshing out an idea. I think you can apply this same logic to nearly any idea in the final 24, and that they all have the potential to turn out really cool — and in some cases, nothing like you would expect when you first hear the description. Good luck to everyone, I am genuinely psyched to see how this turns out.

MDA is finally chugging along and I’ve been having a good time glancing over all of the ideas. I hope you all check out the forums and see the idea discussions going on, but first let me highlight some of my favorites:

Cookbook

There are far too many recipe apps out there, but Cookbook seems like it does something unique. By integrating with Amazon Groceries the app allows the user to focus on actually turning his recipes into reality. I could see someone using Cookbook as such:

• Pick out meals for the week
• Tell Cookbook to order everything you need for the meals
• Use printouts/fullscreen mode to cook with the ingredients delivered to your door

In a lot of ways an all-inclusive solution like this is what makes Mac apps in general so exciting. You can literally pick it up and start a more varied meal-plan in a matter of days, with little effort.

Wormhole

Wormhole isn’t doing anything revolutionary: file transfer between two people. That said, imagining the possible interface for it is tons of fun. CoreAnimation could be used to create a real wormhole effect that literally sucks files in. On the other end, someone could see a little time warp forming which they’d mouse over to reveal a preview of the file, and then it would be beamed onto their computer after accepting. As crazy as it may sound, I think a lot of people can actually identify with an interface like this better than the simple file transfer iChat provides.

AppMover

AppMover makes a ton of sense. The idea is to provide a way for the user to sync their application settings among all of their computers. It’s almost strange that something along these lines wasn’t already built into .mac — after all, it’s possibly the best example of syncing almost anyone would use that I can think of.

These are only a handful of ideas that caught my eye on the forums. Of course, there are thousands more being submitted without a forum post! I can honestly say that I’m looking forward to sifting through all of these, and I hope you keep them coming.

After months of work and buildup, MDA has finally launched and we’re all psyched to see what kind of app ideas you come up with! From the start, MDA has been conceived as a community project. While the apps that we will develop and release are an important part of the equation, your submissions and discussions leading up to the development are equally critical. I hope all of you are planning to submit some great ideas to the contest, and I wish you the best of luck.

Whenever I look at an app or consider an idea for development, I think about more than just the core function itself. The implementation and user experience are both vital to an app’s success. If the idea combines a great function with a user experience that complements and humanizes the function, all the better. Experiences like the cover view of Delicious Library or the worm hole interface of the recently announced Time Machine allow the user to identify with the software and have fun while accomplishing a real goal. Apps like these, that innovate equally in interface and function, are the ideal contestant for MDA. Again, good luck — and go submit your idea now!