so...many...ideas
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 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 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.
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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