As the site’s in a pretty quiet phase right now as we wait for submissions to wrap up, I thought I’d highlight some of the activity going on in the forums community. (A note about featured ideas. These are personal choices and do not reflect judges’ opinions or finalist decisions. In addition, they are chosen from the minority of ideas that contestants have chosen to publicly display in the forums.) Here are a few threads that have caught my eye over the past few days:
Member SeoxyS asks for tips on creating mockups in this thread. Suggestions range from Photoshop, to Interface Builder, to… ASCII mockups.
Snoops shares his idea, Desktop Wars, in the “Critique My Dream App” forum. Imagine battles raging on your desktop, commanding your troops via microphone to attack your neighbor’s harddrive, and shaking your laptop to cause an earthquake. Maybe not the most useful idea, but a really fun one for sure.
Member Delicious-Apples’ PassBack has been receiving a lot of attention in the forums, largely thanks to a series of eye catching mockups, and an idea based on an almost quintessential childhood experience: passing notes. I see a significant barrier to this one being the requirement of note senders and recipients to have the app installed, but it’s a cute idea regardless, not to mention some very pretty visualizations.
Speaking of juicy mockups, michael’s idea had it in spades. His “Recipe Manager and Online Grocery Store” mixes cookbook functionality with Amazon integration to provide one click access to ordering missing ingredients. I’d love to see this idea evolve further along these lines with an optional feature to suggest recipes based on ingredients you have.
This one has me pretty excited. iScream’s Tag Chat provides a super easy way for users with common (and fleeting) interests instantly meet up in a group chat. Just enter some tags, and bam, you’re in. There’s definitely potential roadblocks of hitting that critical mass of users to have chats constantly going for most common tags, but if that level of activity was reached, this would definitely be one of the cooler features to come to chatting in a while.
There’s a lot more cool stuff going on in the forums, so make sure to check them out. And keep those ideas coming, we’re nearing 2000 now after just a few days!
