My Dream App

Jason Harris has been coding up spiffiness and silliness for about ten years, working on such diverse projects as a solid-state quantum computing simulator for electron waves in GaAs semiconductors and a Monte Carlo simulator for electron transport in nanostructure devices. He also wrote insane, down-to-the-metal microcontroller assembly language code for Octofungi, a robotic sculpture. In the Mac world, he's the primary author of ShapeShifter, Mighty Mouse, ThemePark, and heads the open-source Chicken of the VNC and Paranoid Android projects. He digs mountain biking, skateboarding, art, martinis, loud music, and creating oddly euphonious phrases. He never wears shoes if he can help it and can dance like a mofo!

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The third choice was a toughie. It was Atmosphere, Whistler or Portal - I’ve been oscillating between all three for weeks. Basically, my formula saved me - Atmosphere is fairly simple to code and it will sell fairly well. But it ain’t gonna change the world… If the wind had blown slighly harder over New Zealand yesterday, Whistler would be in this spot.

That said, Atmosphere’s a pretty cool idea. And some of the algorithmic stuff would be pretty fun to code - fractal clouds, algorithmic snowflakes, sporadic OpenGL leaf surfaces randomly shifted and overlayed to build up fallen leaves.

And, I foresee a ton of creativity coming from graphics designers creating new desktop packages - we’ll have to make sure that we make the system really open and really easy to use, while remaining powerful. Unfortunately, Atmosphere won’t foster any creativity from users - it’s a passive experience for them.

Ease Of Programming: moderate
Potential Earnings: moderate
Social Good: low

Finally, Cameron seems only fairly good to work with. He’s enthusiastic, which is good, but he seems a bit less engaged than some of the other contestants. I get the impression he’s more interested in the cash than in making a great app.

Vote for Atmosphere!

Damn it, I really wanted to put this in my list of “vote fors”. I would absolutely love to code this. At the same time, I’m completely terrified of coding this. It’s hard, and it’s right at the edge of my abilities. It would really be work. At the same time, I’m completely confident that I could pull it off, and the result would be amazing

The reason this one stayed out of my list of winners is the potential market - I just don’t think it’s big enough. MDA is all about creating consumer-level apps, so we’d be priced fairly low, which helps a bit to broaden the market, but not that much. I just can’t see Whistler having amazing sales, and the sales would need to be amazing to offset the amount of work necessary to create it.

Which sucks, because the amount of social good that could come from Whistler is gigantic. Huge. Whistler could change people’s lives, for the better, launch new careers, bring happiness to people. Damn it.

Ease Of Programming: miniscule
Potential Earnings: moderate
Social Good: huge

Finally, Richard seems like he’d be very good to work with. His design skills are phenomenal. My only complaint is that he still seems somewhat nebulous on Whistler’s feature list, but I suspect he’s done that on purpose and that once it came time to begin development, it would sort itself out.

Don’t vote for Whistler. But I secretly hope that you do anyway. I want it, and I want to code it.

I’m kind of sad about Blossom, as I’m the one who pushed for it to become a finalist. I still love the idea - using positive feedback to increase productivity by way of an emotional attachment. Psychologically, it’s brilliant, and looking at historically similar ideas, I think it would sell like a mofo.

That said, it’s really hard to code and it’s got to be just right or it won’t sell at all. The plant algorithms are hard, obviously. They’ve got to be compelling and interesting, and continually so. Getting it right would take a lot of work.

Collecting the performance metrics (is an app/window good or bad) is hard too, as it involves lots of weirdness with the Accessibility APIs and lots of special case code. More hard coding.

Moreover, Blossom would need a gadjillion special case things to keep the user interested. Cutesy things like a bee occasionally coming to investigate a flower, or a snail slowly making its way up the tree, stuff like that. Each of those is coding time, and it would need a ton of surprises like that to keep the user engaged over a long time span.

But my big problem with Blossom is that I just don’t like how it’s been fleshed out over the course of this contest. It’s become less compelling to me than it was at the beginning. I’m just not enthusiastic about it anymore.

Ease Of Programming: low
Potential Earnings: high
Social Good: high

Finally, I didn’t really ever get a sense of how Dan would be to work with. I’m not sure why - he’s been active during the course of the contest. Maybe it’s because I don’t feel as though I have personally interacted with him much.

Don’t vote for Blossom…

It’s probably no surprise that I want this one to get made, since I’ve been pimping it for the whole competition. One more time, all together now: “IT IS FEASIBLE!!!”

Hijack was impossible five years ago, but two things have made it possible today: the rise of semantic web programming (read, CSS) and WebKit, which can do the heavy lifting for us. Put ‘em together and DOM scraping becomes eminently feasible. Identification is the tough part, but it’s not insurmountable.

Hijack’s hard to code, granted. But its potential earnings are huge. Seriously, take a look at this Internet of ours. Every big site has a forum. Why? People use ‘em, people like ‘em. The number of Mac users on the Internet is but a fraction, and the number of Mac users who use forums is but a fraction, and the number of Mac forum users who’d buy Hijack is but a fraction. But the initial pool of people is so huge that even a fraction works out to a huge potential audience. And the idea is compelling enough to change the industry and raise all of those percentages.

Finally, Kevin looks like he’ll be absolutely stellar to work with during development! His design skills are amazing, and he’s been receptive, friendly and funny. A++, would vote again.

Ease Of Programming: low
Potential Earnings: huge
Social Good: high

It’s the creation of a new genre. Vote for Hijack!

This one is an easy winner. The potential market is large, and if executed well (functional, beautiful and EASY), Cookbook should enjoy good, steady sales. It’s not going to be gigantic, but it’ll sell well unless we really screw things up. And if we can create a community around RecipeCasting or RecipeSS, it’ll grow, and grow well. And it’ll make people happy along the way.

More importantly, there are no large technical challenges to writing it. There’s a lot of work there, certainly - it’s a large program. But it’s all completely conventional code and techniques. Lots of the development time can, and should, be spent on design and workflow analysis.

Ease Of Programming: high
Potential Earnings: high
Social Good: moderate

Finally, Michael looks like he’ll be absolutely stellar to work with during development! His ability to simplify a complex idea into a UI that seems simple yet is still powerful is absolutely first rate, and he’s been completely receptive and friendly all the way through.

Easy to code, easy to sell. Vote for Cookbook!

I also had a really hard time not putting this one into my list of “vote fors”. At the beginning of the competition, I was completely unenthusiastic about it. But since then, Farzad has put a ton of effort into it and has been amazingly polite, enthusiastic, and receptive along the way, and I’ve really warmed up to it as a result.

Is Portal needed? Absolutely! Do I want to write it? Nope. The concept just doesn’t excite me. Moving files back and forth ain’t sexy. The UI has promise, lots of it, but it ain’t there yet and the enthusiasm I have is mainly of the “could be” variety. The syncing animations (the wormholes) have never appealed to me, and I’m someone who likes gratuitous eye candy!

Coding Portal is moderately complicated as it involves lots of low-level file system notification stuff and lots of high level networking stuff. I think Portal would sell fairly well, but not hugely. And, unfortunately, nobody is going to wet their pants over how Portal has changed their lives.

I’d hit it, but I don’t have a crush on it.

Ease Of Programming: low
Potential Earnings: moderate
Social Good: low

Finally, Farzad seems like he’d be phenomenal to work with! As I said, his enthusiasm, receptiveness and amenability have all been first rate.

Don’t vote for Portal…

There’s really nothing I can say about this one. It’s cooked and ready. The mockups are just awesome, basically usable as is, and ditto with the tech. It’s solid as hell and flashy as hell. I’m a fan.

<sigh> Feasibility issues just keep on coming up with this one no matter how loudly I shout that I know how to code it. IT’S FEASIBLE!!!! DOM scraping! Aaarrgghh! I swear it’s true!

Feedback is an interesting thing.

Diets trade long-term positive feedback (I look hawt!) for short-term negative feedback (tastes good, want now!!!). That’s why they’re hard.

Blossom doesn’t involve any trades - it’s long-term positive feedback (better productivity) and short-term positive feedback (the plant that I’ve become emotionally attached to grew a new flower).

This is, in a peapod, why I like Blossom.

This one’s got a lot of strikes against it. Rumor has it that OmniGroup is doing a competitor. Jeff, the contestant, is having some nasty real-life issues which have prevented him from really fleshing out how the app would work. And, to be honest, I just never really warmed up to the idea in the first place.

To put things in a nice light, I hope that I don’t have to code iGTD if it wins. :)

I’m beginning to really warm up to this one after a lukewarm beginning. Farzad has been working his, uhh, rear portal off refining his user interface mockups, and the result is really beginning to pay off. I think that they’re still overly complex, but I can see where it’s going and how it could become compelling now.

Portal has switched from a meh to a yeah for me.

Atmosphere got an incredibly cool interface mockup this week courtesy of shadownight. At this point, all of the pieces are in place for Atmosphere - it’s easy to code, and I think it’s commercially viable. I hope this one goes far.

They say if you can’t say anything nice then you shouldn’t say anything at all. But it starts with “cluster”.

This one is just getting cooler and cooler. Most of the tech details are now ironed out, at least in rough form, and Richard’s mockups are just amazing. Bringin’ music to the masses, yo!

Switching gears into business geek mode for a moment, this one is a paradigm changer. Revolutionary. I hope it gets made.

This idea has insane amounts of potential, which I’d love to see come to fruition! The only thing that’s even remotely challenging about it is coming up with content.

Seems that there are two options - one is to overlay the current weather on top of your existing desktop picture, so that droplets appear to be spattering against the backside of your screen. Any arbitrary desktop picture could be used with this approach.

The other is to modify aspects of a custom desktop picture with specially tailored content. For example, the sky of your picture would be sunny, or cloudy, or snowy, or clear with a full moon, or whatever is appropriate. This is harder from a content point of view, as the sky needs to be nicely masked out of the desktop picture - this cannot be automated. However, for someone familiar with Photoshop, this is very easy to do. I like this idea more.

But in either case, I want it on my desktop!

Sleepytime for this one. It’s been under attack from all fronts - existing offerings are improving rapidly, new offerings are in the works, and the contestant hasn’t been meeting the challenges very well.

I have absolutely nothing bad to say about this one at all, so instead, I’ll talk specifics. The idea of Amazon integration has been hotly debated on the topics. Most people seem to want some sort of shopping integration, but don’t want it to be Amazon. I like the idea of using plugins for shopping integration, so that the community can create them for their favorite e-tailers, but I’d also like My Dream App to get the referral fees from those plugins. :)

Any suggestions on reconciling the two?

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.

Kill it. The original idea as espoused by Andrew was fun and simple. But Andrew’s not been super-involved in keeping the idea alive, and the idea has begun to morph into something that cannot be implemented by a single developer and a single designer in a realistic timespan. In fact, the idea as it now stands might not be feasible at all, by any development team (unless it was Apple’s Finder team, anyway!).

Farzad has been doing some absolutely excellent work on mockups for Portal. I don’t know why I’m not more excited about the idea. Between its usefulness and its fun factor (see wormholes), it should have me all hot and bothered. No clue why I’m not - it’s a good idea, Farzad’s conception seems flawless, and it’s needed.

I adore this idea. And I was pretty sure it was feasible, but I hadn’t thought it through completely. Thanks to some lively chat with Devon on the forums, I’ve now thought things through much more and am pretty much convinced that this app can be written! Whoo, Whistler!

I want this, badly. I think I’ve said something about it every round, and I’m not going to stop - Blossom rules. Increasing productivity by associating it with a nurturing instinct is just flat-out brilliant.

This idea continues to rock. But the feasibility of this idea keeps getting brought up over and over again, and I keep saying it can be done without too much trouble, in a variety of ways. So that’s all I’ll say this time around - this idea is fully implementable by the MDA team. Go Hijack!

I liked this idea a lot at the beginning of the competition, but it’s been languishing a bit. Now, “shadownight’s” excellent mockups have brought it back to the fore. Groovy!

(And I still love the idea of putting superfluous visual effects on notes that have been stuck somewhere unseen for a long time. Like a spider scuttling behind the note when it first appears.)

This idea is really powerful to me. But it’s biggest problem is that it appeals to a genre of user who is unlikely to actually show up on My Dream App to vote for it. It’s the same market that Nintendo is targeting - people who don’t care about computers (or games) for their own sake, they just want something slick and easy to use that’ll help with what they DO care about.

My problem with iStyleIt is threefold:

• It’s not been well-developed yet on the forums, which makes me worry about its long-term viability. If the person with the idea doesn’t care enough about the idea to make it compelling, how am I supposed to code it compellingly?
• It requires lots of work from the user. The user needs to actually enter in his or her wardrobe, and all of its associated details. That doesn’t sound like fun, it sounds like work.
• The tech is hard. If it uses the iSight to scan barcodes, well, it’s not like Delicious Library where there’s one website (Amazon) with a public API that can be used to map the barcode to a picture of the product. It might be a designer label, it might be from Walfart, there might not be a picture of it online, and the barcode doesn’t tell you where it came from anyway. As I said, “hard”.

So while I like this idea a lot, I wonder if maybe I like the conception of it more than I’d like the reality.

Michael’s mockups are so good I’m tempted to just bite the bullet and hire him now to do UI design. The interface seems simple, but is actually extremely powerful. And even more importantly, there are all sorts of subtle clues telling the user where she is and where to go. Excellent UI all around.

Moreover, actually implementing Cookbook is relatively straightforward - there’s nothing particularly tricky about it as far as coding goes.

Nothing bad to say about this one.

I still don’t understand this app. It seems like it’s all about eye-candy. Which is great. Except that syncing files is something you want to “just work”, invisibly.

That said, the eye candy stuff seems like a ton of fun, and it would be cool to implement with an open-API that allows users to create their own content by, say, inserting bits of video for particular bits of functionality, or by writing Flash.

I also worry about marketability with this one. A lot of people use syncing as a form of backup. Time Machine will suck that market away. A lot of people buy .Mac when they buy their computer. They won’t be very inclined to buy a second syncing utility. And, of course, a lot of people aren’t power-user enough to know that such a concept as “syncing” even exists.

I like that Mickey is trying to stir the pot with this one, and that he’s approaching things in a straightforward and competitive manner. I just wish the actual app he was pimping was more compelling.

I agree that video blogging is going to be big, much bigger than it is now. The issue is that either iVlog stays simple, in which case, it’s pretty easy for someone to come along and offer the same thing for free, or else it becomes complex by adding editing and effects, at which point it becomes iMovie, which is also (for all intents and purposes) free. Hmmmm.

I don’t like this idea much. The problem, I think, is that to be useful, it needs to be super-fast in popping up the data you want. For example, if you want the translation of “la chichona”, you want to just mouse over the words and hit your key command that means, “Hey, Bubble Fish! Grab the current word, make sure I have an internet connection, send it to the Mexican slang translation website, wait for the Mexican slang translation website to translate it and send it back, then format that nicely and show it to me in a popup window. NOWWW!!!!”

If it takes too long, users won’t use it - they’ll just copy the word, jump into their browser, and paste instead. Or not worry about it and go on with whatever they were actually trying to accomplish.

And there’s no way to fix it except by having all of the information locally on your computer. You can’t guess ahead of time what word the user is going to send to Bubble Fish, in order to “prewarm” the data. It could be anything, sent to any of the websites Bubble Fish knows about.

So, while I think the idea itself is good, I think in implementation, it’s not going to be too useful. Which is unfortunate, as it’d be cool.

I love this idea, and it’d be fun to code. I think I’ve already talked quite a bit about the tech aspects, so I’ll just summarize what I think can be done without too much trouble:

• Recognize pure tones, transcribe them to midi, and pitch correct them, probably to nearest half-step
• Apply vibrato if it seems like what the user wanted
• Recognize percussion
• Normalize tempo, probably to within nearest 32nd note
• Map different percussive pitches to different instruments

I’d love to see some sort of Muppets Animal type of monster playing a virtual drum set as I tap on my desk. I’d never get another line of code written if I had this!

This is a really powerful idea that isn’t getting as much attention as I’d like. Trip planning is both fun and sucky, at the same time. It’s fun because, well, you know you’re going on a trip. It sucks because it’s a pain. I see Destinations as amplifying the fun and clipping the suck.

Austin’s call on using a groovy map rather than a source-list is dead on. This app should be all about the eye candy. For example, on my cheesy honeymoon photo site (http://corrieandjason.com/honeymoon), I don’t have a textual list of the places we went. I’ve got spiffy maps that took me 87 hours of screwing around in Illustrator to make!

So Destinations should be able to do the following:

• Provide a list of things to do, hotels, and flights for an arbitrary destination. They don’t have to be all-encompassing, they just have to provide the bare outlines. Making suggestions is a plus.
• Manage an itinerary.
• Handle travel journal entries.
• Sync with iPhoto albums.
• Provide trip timelines for later review.

The entire appeal of this app lies in its simplicity. This is definitely one where if power is going to be added, it MUST be done without adding any additional user interface complexity.

Basically, I think this should just consist of pre-built puppet parts that can be hooked together “Mister Potatohead” style. Existing or user-defined colors, textures, OR VIDEO can be applied to the parts, and the parts can be stretched or condensed.

Note the mention of video. What I’m referring to here is the ability to replace the face with, for example, a short video of a thumb puppet, or your boss yelling, or something fun like that. And I don’t know why you’d want to texture a puppet leg with video, but if you can do it the face, you may as well be able to do it to a leg, too!

The parts should move along well-defined paths, with correlations between movements possible. For example, someone suggested something along the lines of making the eyebrows raise when the mouth smiles. This is a good idea.

Finally, I like the idea of leaving a process resident that will periodically animate your puppets across your workspace when you least expect it. Like, your most recent puppet might walk on stilts across your Pages document a few hours after you finished working with the puppet. :)

This was one of my favorite submissions, but I don’t like the way it’s progressing. I don’t care about collaborative whiteboards. At all. I care about capitalizing on people sharing stupid media with each other, which is obviously something that’s very popular (see YouTube). And that’s what I think Chatboard’s strength should be. Collaborative whiteboarding should be secondary. A distant second.

Chatboard in its default configuration should be nothing more than a window that sits at your desktop level. If you find something you think your friends would enjoy seeing, drag it in - it’ll appear in all of your friends’ windows. The “something” you drag in can be a movie, a flash game, a website, a song, a PDF, a picture, text, whatever. Or, it can be a collaborative drawing or text - that’s the whiteboard part. Which, as I said, is a secondary goal.

There are technical considerations here, of course - there always are. But everything I said above is possible to do, and it’s the direction I’d like to see Chatboard take. A name change might be in order there, too… If whiteboarding is secondary, the name shouldn’t focus on it.

I like the concept behind this idea a lot, but I’d like to see it get fleshed out more. Right now, it seems as though it’s trying to be a jack of all trades and a master of none. My conception is that its reason for existing is to abstract websites to which one commonly posts content into a unified interface. That’s it.

So here’s what it needs: A list of the sites its tracking. These can be forums, myspace, friendster, flickr sets, whatever. It needs some way of indicating whether there’s new content available for each of these sites.

Then, for the selected site, it should show the current posts, or pics, or whatever. Each “genre” of site (blogs, forums, photo archives) should present its content in the same interface. There should (optionally) be a way of seeing where you left off last time. There should be a way of posting new content.

That’s it.

I don’t know if I’d personally use this app, but I think it would be super-popular. What’s compelling about it is that it abstracts a bunch of different functionality from different programs into a common interface (see also, Hijack).

What’s challenging about GC is that each individual module would be moderately challenging to write on its own. Putting them all together, the task becomes pretty formidable. But the idea’s compelling enough that it’s probably worthwhile.

Something I’d really like to see in GC is a unified skin system. I definitely see skins being popular for something like this, but doing it correctly would take some thought. Basically, I envision the skin designer basically creating a CSS stylesheet for various text types (app name, section header, explanatory text, etc.). The skin designer would also provide graphics for panel backgrounds, buttons, checkboxes, etc. Finally, the skin designer would provide a set of Core Image filters that would be applied to application icons. This would allow, for example, the Mail.app icon to appear nicely monotone and desaturated, blending with the GC background.

With a skin system like this, I think the modules could just use standard Cocoa widgets and the underlying engine would theme ‘em appropriately.

Finally, something that was very compelling to me in the early GC mockups that seems to have disappeared is having functionality on the portion of GC that’s initially visible to the user, and NOT just on the sheet that slides out. For example, when you view GC in its default configuration, you should immediately be able to see how many emails you have unread, what today’s date is and whether there are any appointments pending, and so on. Clicking any of those modules should then provide more detail.

I don’t think I’d actually use this myself, but it would be fun to watch other people use it. In the same way that watching people play Dance Dance Revolution is fun. But I could see it really taking off IF it works reliably.

And that might be a problem. Feature abstraction from moving images is a tough problem. I think it can be done, but I don’t know how accurate it’d be. For example, if there are people walking around behind the person who’s trying to control the computer with her hand, well, it might break horribly. Likewise, if the user is sitting in front of a wild Mondrian painting, same deal.