My Dream App

Wil Shipley created the shareware hit Delicious Library and Delicious Monster after leaving The Omni Group, which he founded in 1989. Delicious Library was one of the largest shareware successes in recent years, selling over $250,000 worth of licenses in its first month. You can view his personal blog here.

After reading the description I still have no idea what this app does, which worries me. The handwaving factor on this one is at, like, 9.6. It’s got some kind of scripting! And stacks! And HTML! And, uh, Web 2.0! Ruby on Snakes!

This is an OK idea, but I don’t know how I’d program such a beast — this is the kind of utility that wouldn’t be super-hard for Apple to write, but that would be nigh-impossible for a 3rd-party programmer. Stickies in folders means modifying the Finder, which is Carbon. Stickies in menu items in random apps means tapping into AppKit, which leads us into all kinds of nasty hacks that might not work in Leopard. Basically, the payoff of stickies everywhere wouldn’t be worth the years of effort of writing this app, in my view.

I’ve seen this idea a bunch over the years; someone once took a newsreader I wrote for NeXTSTEP and tried to modify it to do something similar for his PhD. But the central problem remains unsolved: how do you populate your paper with actual interesting content? Sure, it’s easy to say, “I like this comic, cut it out of the web for me every day,” (and in fact Leopard does this already), but how do you go to a news site and say, “Uh, show me only the articles I’d find interesting.” If Bogumil is just talking about reading every article from an RSS feed, then, well, I feel like we already have an interface for that, and I can’t imagine how you’d map such an incredible volume of stuff automatically onto a couple pages. (Consider that newspapers are, like, hundreds of pages long, every day.)

You could attempt to winnow the RSS pipes’ content down by using the new Latent Semantic Mapping framework in Leopard — the user could rate articles and “Herald” would slowly learn what she liked, much as Apple’s spam filtering learns what you dislike. But that’s not really specified in the original Herald idea.

Text-to-speech is a great unexplored area, but one problem with it is that most of us can read faster than we can listen. Also, web pages and (especially) PDF documents tend to not always have their layouts in a logical way, and have lots of extraneous text. Try opening up some random PDF document in Preview and hitting “select all” and then pasting it into TextEdit. You’ll likely find it a complete mishmash. If the computer tried to read this to you it’d be unintelligible.

I’m always leery when people say, “It’s like this free app that bundles with the system, but done right!” (c.f. OmniWeb) How would I program Ground Control? Is it compatible with Dashboard? Who is the target market? People who love widgets so much that they *have* to have them on their main screen? If you actually came up with a clearly better innovation here, Apple would just copy it and you’d end up with no market again. Writing this kind of software is a quick way to stay poor.

A fun idea, and I believe it to be practical, but I’m not sure that it’s something people would use. Honestly, it’s tiring to hold something up in front of the computer. Try to just hold your hand in front of your monitor for two minutes. It gets old really fast.

Sounds kind of fun, but there are two big problems of which I can think: first, it’s not really interesting to just stare at the sun all day every day if you live in, say, Hawaii, and second (and related), most cities tend to have the same basic weather for months on end. If I live in Minnesota, I probably get tired of seeing snow outside all the time; I certainly don’t want it on my desktop for five months every year.

In the end, this is a solution looking for a problem. If I want to know what the weather is like outside, I just look up from my monitor for a moment. I can’t see spending months of my life trying to make that more efficient.

I’ve seen this idea too many times. The problem with making a all-in-one application is you have to get everything right or it sucks. I’ve never even seen a mail client that people can agree is the best, how would you write a mail/calendar/rss/what-have-you program that’s better than all the individual solutions right now? Aren’t you just replacing what should be the desktop’s function?

This sounds pretty fun, really. Not sure if there are enough axes of input to make interesting puppets, but it’d be fun as heck to try. One could also hook up a bunch of mice to a single computer and map them to different movements, and have a wild time animating a movie with a bunch of friends. I like this idea.

This app would be very simple to write. I’m not sure how many people actually WANT to vlog. It’s very unnerving. I’m pretty egotistical, but even I don’t want to look at myself that much. Also, I take points away for the hand-waving at the end (”speech recognition! blogging! podcast! vlan! metadata tagging with bio-informatics!”)

Again, a neat idea that is REALLY hard. Apple’s been slowly trying to do exactly this for years now, and they’ve had to back off several times as they inch closer to it. (And, notably, you can already sync iCal calendars — minus points for not paying attention.) Here are some problems with syncing files:

1) Where do you store the file so that the other machine can get to it? It has to be on a machine that’s accessible to both machines, which means you need a server somewhere, unless you want to force the user to bring the machines into physical contact to sync.

2) If you store this ‘master’ file on the net, you’d better have a darn good net connection, because lots of files that users typically use are several megabytes. Consider the average Photoshop or OmniGraffle document.

3) Trying to do file syncing of an app’s data files without an app’s knowledge is tricky at best, because you could launch the application on a machine when the file on that machine is NOT in sync (imagine the network is down, or slow) and proceed to innocently make changes, not realizing you are changing an older version of the file.

4) If you do make changes to both versions of the file, there’s no way for “Portal” to know how to sync up the changes for EVERY type of app in the world. With Apple’s syncing, they have certain well-defined types of files and have a protocol for resolving conflicts in them. But they can’t resolve, say, two Photoshop files or even two text files.

In general, Sync Services can pretty much do what this app is intended to do, except individual application developers are going to have to extend their applications to support it. There’s really not much of a way around this on a system where data files aren’t all structured.

Not a bad idea, but the only people I know who are this organized are programmers and crazy people. I wouldn’t want to try to sell to either group.

Fun and innovative, and I think it’s practical, but it’d require some real signal processing skills. There’s a lot of ways you could expand this application once you get the basics working — you could recognize notes played, say, on a trumpet, and input them as MIDI, and then have a MIDI version of your existing trumpet for just a couple bucks instead of $2,500.

This seems like an app I’d use, like, once a year at most. I doubt I’d buy or even download an app for something that uncommon. I’d probably use a website, of which there are already plenty, and which has the advantage of being able to sell me tickets.

Also, why would I care to see what the weather is like someplace else in the world? Am I going to try to hop a supersonic jet and get there before it stops raining or something?

This is a neat idea. While it may be tricky to specify what it means to be “actively” using an app (do you have to be typing? how does the program detect this?), I think it’s worth exploring.