My Dream App

Paul Stamatiou is part Georgia Tech student, part Mac guru and part tech blogger. He has been blogging tech-related news, reviews and guides at PaulStamatiou.com for a year now and has amassed quite a following. When he's not on his 24-inch iMac fixing looking over Yahoo's corporate blog, Yodel Anecdotal, which he built during his summer internship, Paul tinkers with his Mustang or competes in ultimate frisbee games on campus.

I’m not one to make an calendar entry for every thing that happens in my life, but I can see iGTD helping me tame my school life. As you’ve stated though, there is a ton of competition for a GTD app like this. iGTD will have to be easy to use, easy to figure out after checking it out for the first time and reliable. I like how you said that it should “guide you through how to get started with a GTD app.” That sums it up perfectly. I’m an early adopter too and whenever such a new app comes out, I’ll always download it at least to see what it’s about. During those first 5 minutes, if I don’t get how to use it or fit it into my lifestyle, I’ll be appzapping it immediately.

Hijack immediately caught my attention as an application that would have a definite use. I’m active on a dozen forums at any given time and having the ability to contain that experience into one application would not only save time but help me keep track of multiple threads with ease. I see Hijack becoming a necessity in the near future, as the RSS aggregator has become. It still has a few usability hurdles before it comes to fruition, but HiJack would definitely be an app I could see myself not only using, but paying for.

Chatboard promises a lot with the ability to support just about any file type and be a media share/collaborative space. I think the idea has yet to be fully realized and needs to mature before adding any more features. I already think this one will be a challenge for developers. In it’s most basic principle, Chatboard sounds like your run of the mill Basecamp account, with drag and drop.

Atmosphere is a simply kickass application idea. I’m always tied to my weather widget. It’s the first thing I check in the morning before trekking out to class . Bringing that functionality to the desktop itself, with an air of captivating visuals. And yes, a random weather mode would be awesome. I’m from Texas, so a blizzard would be pretty cool on my desktop. Rock on.

Bookroom is an idea that will probably be another must have. At least at Georgia Tech, most of my classes supply readings in PDF format and sometimes even give us PDF-only textbooks. After a short time, juggling a few hundred PDFs with nothing more than an archaic set of folders becomes unproductive and exceedingly annoying. Bookroom has the power to tame my PDFs and I especially like the snippets feature. I can’t say that I would ever use the text-to-speech feature though. I can read faster than I listen and if I was listening and doing something else, it would be hard for me to take notes and make snippets. Another thing is that most of my PDFs are simply scanned books and don’t have the OCR capability. All in all Bookroom might not woo the others as much, but I see some great potential.

From the sound of it, Herald appears as though it will mimic the newspaper-layout of Microsoft’s recent “Max” RSS aggregator. I think you should strongly consider the final goal for Herald. The RSS aggregator market is probably the most dense of any type of application out there. Herald would have to be remarkably different while retaining its down-to-earth functionality. How many people can you vision listening to their feeds spoken to them on their iPod? How about people printing out their daily feed fill? I can’t even remember the last time I printed something. Maybe some mockups would help clear things up.

Dan, you’ve captivated me with your UI concept. A fun app idea with a great fill of eye candy. I would finally be able to see how much time I spend in various apps everyday. It’s a truly original idea with a phenomenal featureset and has never been done before. I’m rooting (lol) for ya!

“YESS!!!!11one111″ was exactly what I was thinking when I first heard about the Ground Control idea a while back. Now that I have some stunning visuals to pair with this idea, Ground Control is aiming to be a productivity powerhouse. For that to work the best, usability and placement of each element needs to be honed down to perfection. Hopefully it won’t clash too much with the dock and actually be worth its screen real estate.