My Dream App

Allan Odgaard is the developer of the extremely popular text editor, TextMate. The application recently won an Apple Design Award for "Best Developer Tool" at the 2006 World Wide Developers Conference. You can view the TextMate blog here.

It is unclear who would use this tool. Anyone who would turn this into a real melody afterwards would likely be proficient with a real MIDI keyboard and so prefer that.

I could however see a great benefit in having this tool when trying to get a feel for which sounds translate to what notes. This would change Whistler to more of an educational tool, but I think the two goals can be combined.

I rarely follow forums for the simple reason that I can’t stand the browser experience, so I would welcome a dedicated desktop application for this instead.

But it seems that a better approach would be to provide an NNTP or similar interface to the forums, so that the user can use existing news readers, rather than (re)invent a news reader specifically for web forum systems.

But I definitely like the goal of Hijack.

I am not into GTD, but I am into to-do lists. The ability to pick from a small list what to do next is a tremendous help when trying to be productive, and being able to check an item as “done” gives a nice feeling.

I use text files myself for this, but if the interface for iGTD was a real pleasure to use (i.e. smooth animations when re-ordering items etc.) then I might be inclined to spend my time in iGTD for to-do list maintenance.

It should of course read/import my current to-do lists, which can be done by scanning files in a folder for lines tagged with TODO.

Looking up e.g. selected text (on the internet) can be done with less than a handful of key strokes when using tools like Quicksilver.

So the potential advantage of Bubble Fish should be to lower that to a single key stroke (like Tiger’s dictionary lookup on ??D) and it should, as noted in the entry, present the information in the actual pop-up.

So whether or not this entry has merit would likely be decided on whether or not it is possible to present the information retrieved in a useful way.

I am a little skeptical about e.g. reading wikipedia articles in pop-up windows, but I have grown very dependent on Tiger’s dictionary pop-up window.

As a child I loved to play with The Newsroom (for C64) and similar programs which allowed me to produce something which looked (relatively) professional.

So I would put emphasis on making it easy to produce something which looks good. Ideally it would offer templates and characters from popular cartoons such as South Park, but likely this would result in trademark problems.

It is however an angle which would broaden the appeal of Puppet Constructor.

I don’t want my computer to reflect the weather when it is overcast, or for all those dark winter months.

Instead show me a japanese garden, a waterfall, a beautiful sunset, or the view as if my monitor was a window in a cabin located in the rain forrest, and I would love to run this program!

It does amaze me that nothing good exists for sharing images. The need does frequently arise for me, and I am rarely dealing with graphics, so I would think there is a market for this.

But of course it needs to be super simple to use, needs to work for users behind NAT, and it would help the adoption if people without the dedicated application could still get a peek of what goes on via snapshots provided over http.

For the latter one could use an existing image sharing service.

I do not see the value of this program. It is basically just a diary program with a name that implies that the diary is for writing about your pet.

There are too many different pets to impose any format for the log entries, which means “sending the report to the vet” would amount to very verbosely telling the veterinarian about the symptoms and recent behavior. I don’t think he or she would see the value in that.

So thumbs down on this entry. But kudos for spotting a niche. I think to target it, you need to limit yourself to just one type of pet and do a lot of research about this type, to be able to offer more than just a generic log book system.