Brent Simmons's Comments:
Bob Conlon
It’s been my experience that people prefer rails (grids, tables, outlines) to piles. People (in general) don’t even like drag-and-drop or drag-and-connect — and they don’t like “object-oriented reality” apps since they take too much input.
A great example of the right amount of real-world-ness is Delicious Library — it’s real-world like, with covers of books and DVDs and shelves, but it also keeps things in a clean grid. No piles of things.
This idea reminds me a bit of Spring, which won an innovators award from O’Reilly but ultimately didn’t find the audience it deserved.
Kevin Capizzi
I would like this app myself, but I fear that the amount of work makes it way too expensive right now. There isn’t a standard API for reading and writing to forums, so this app would have to do a ton of screen-scraping, and it would have to be able to deal with all the different forum software and all the possible customizations people could do to their forums.
A standard API for forums would be totally cool — and then this app would be do-able. But we don’t have that today.
Mike Gaboury
It sounds like fun for a few minutes — but it would become tiring after a while. It would mean having to reach for my red pen (or whatever) — which is one more input device, which means my interaction with my computer is more complex rather than less complex.
Typing and using the mouse requires little muscular effort compared to waving a pen in front of my iSight — and I think that effort would become a nuisance and I wouldn’t do it anymore.
And any artist who doesn’t buy a graphics tablet for drawing is probably an artist who doesn’t do much drawing.
Marshall Kucharczyk
A certain subset of users love little apps that do this kind of housekeeping, keeping things clean and organized. (And other users just don’t care and use Spotlight to find things.) The trick is to make the rules very flexible and find a way to get animations and eye candy in there — it needs to wow people not just in what it does but in how it does it. (Virtual robots, perhaps.)
Windy Chen
Were I part of the target audience I’m sure this would sound like total fun. There is the potential for lots of eye candy and fun iSight stuff.
My biggest concern is that the target audience may be too small to make it worthwhile. You have to not only be into clothes in a big way but also have a ton of time to take pictures of your clothes via iSight. I just don’t know how many people have that kind of time and also have the extra money to spend on software.
The amount of programming effort it would take to deal with putting clothes on virtual models and so on makes this an expensive app to create. It’s way complex to properly fit a photo of a shirt on a photo of a person.
Dillon Krug
I *so* want to love this idea. Me, I’m a reader, first and foremost. I think it could work well for web text (PDFs, HTML text files, and so on). Features like snippets, searching, text-to-speech, and annotation are definitely cool.
My only concern is with longer-form text — actual books, I mean. Laptops are too bulky and hot, and the screen doesn’t have near the resolution needed to make that kind of reading comfortable. And part of the beauty of books is that there is no eye candy — it’s just black print on white pages, since that’s actually a great user interface for reading.
That said, if the app concentrated on shorter text, stuff found on the web, then I think it has a good shot at being something I’d use.
Mickey Wember
Good idea! Much depends on the actual execution of the app — but if it’s easy to start or append to the day’s entry, then you’ve got it made. Ideally there’s a way I can launch the app with a voice command.
Jeff Greenberg
This idea should get done. It hardly matters whether it’s a good idea for an app or not. (I think it is a good idea, but it doesn’t matter.) When a person wants to get organized, step zero is always to *buy something* that will help them get organized. If iGTD is that thing they buy, then you’ll make a mint.
I’ve been saying for a long time that, were I just starting out as a Cocoa developer, I’d do a GTD app, since I think there is the potential to do something super-cool and make a ton of money.
Brent Simmons
NetNewsWireBrent Simmons is best known for breaking ground with one of the first RSS aggregators for OS X, NetNewsWire and the free NetNewsWire Lite. NetNewsWire has won a Macworld Eddy in 2005 and was a recipient of the O'Reilly Mac OS X Innovators Award in 2003. You can view his personal blog here.