My Dream App

John Gruber writes Daring Fireball. He lives in Philadelphia.

Your UI mock-ups look OK cosmetically (although I find it fascinating that so many people already want to rip off the iTunes 7 look-and-feel) but they don’t convey how the app actually works. You need to simplify, simplify, simplify — the UI shouldn’t just look pretty, it should make it clear what the user is supposed to do.

You’re also glossing over some very difficult technical challenges. With Apple’s .Mac synching APIs, developers can write code to sync atomic elements, even if they’re stored in the file system in a largish database. For example, when I sync my Yojimbo database, only new and changed items get synched, even though the whole thing is stored in a 30 MB database. How will Portal solve this?

Where are all these e-books you’d be reading? I have a few PDF “books”, but certainly not enough to justify a special screenreading program. The big problem is that real audio books feature talented vocal artists; even Leopard’s text-to-speech is terribly lame compared to even a mediocre professional (human) reader. Text-to-speech might be bearable for articles (especially with the forthcoming improvements in Leopard), but not for books.

I’m not sure there’s a market for this, but if there is, I think printing is the key feature. There are already a bunch of good desktop and web-based feed readers, and the fact that they don’t aggregate everything together into a “customized newspaper” isn’t a bad thing. When I’m reading at my computer, my feeds are “all together” because they’re all right here on my screen. *But*: if I want to print stuff out to read while I’m offline, it’s a real pain in the ass right now because I’ve got to print everything separately. I think you should concentrate on the printing aspect — people who commute to work on public transportation might love something like this.

This is the best idea in the whole batch: it’s feasible, it would be useful, it might be fun, and people might actually buy it. I can’t say those things about any other idea.

You really need to concentrate on making it as easy, quick, and obvious as possible to configure goals and rules. If it’s too complicated, or if it takes too many clicks to make adjustments, then people aren’t going to actually use it, even if they want to. An anti-procrastination tool or system can’t feel like work itself; if it does, people will procrastinate to avoid the tool or system.

The whole point is to get you to concentrate on the things you want to be concentrating on; Blossom needs to be a motivator, not a distraction in and of itself. Make it as simple as you possibly can. Ask yourself how Apple would do this — think about the options and preferences that they would remove just to make it simpler and more obvious. (Another good thing about your idea is that this is the sort of app that Apple would never actually do themselves — but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t think about how they would do it if they did.)

I honestly don’t understand who wouold use this app. Who would record a video journal for their own private use? And for video podcasting, how is this better than using iMovie, which has a very nice interface for live recording from an iSight? I see no market for this app.

I think the Leopard version of iChat crushes this idea.

People love fun stuff on their desktop, so I can definitely see people using this app. I’m not sure, though, that people would *pay* for this app — it’s the sort of idea that I suspect would be *wildly* successful as freeware but might not succeed at all as commercial software. I love the overall simplicity of the idea, though, so I’m definitely rooting for you.

Suggestion-off-the-top-of-my-head: Maybe make a free version where you can only use the artwork that comes with the freeware version, and a “pro” version that lets you use additional artwork bundles — both from you and from other users of the pro version.

This seems like the sort of idea that would be better as a web application, not a desktop application. If I want to be reminded of something via SMS at a certain time, that means my Mac running Telepath has to be awake and online at that time, too. I.e. how would Telepath send me an SMS when my PowerBook is closed and sleeping in my backpack? And speaking of backpacks, 37signals’s Backpack is a web service that offers exactly what I’m talking about, as web service.