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.
Austin Sarner
AppZapperAustin Sarner has been developing in Cocoa for a while now and making Mac apps for even longer. His most notable contribution to the Mac shareware scene has been AppZapper, although he has also worked on a number of other freeware and shareware projects, including the much anticipated upcoming Disco. When not coding, Austin meticulously juggles his time between his other passions: Ukranian Nationalist folk music and keeping his hair straight.
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