The vast majority of the submitted ideas were totally solid - they fit a definite need, and were well articulated. We might not have picked them because the need they met was too niche, or there was already something well established that met that need, or they wouldn’t sell well, or they didn’t do anything that was Mac-specific, or they just didn’t wiggle our woggle.
But there were also a select few entries that were just, well … bad. I’m sure that the people who submitted ‘em are their own special snowflake, but their snowflakeness just didn’t come through in their submission. So I’m going to go through a few of them. The intent here isn’t to make fun of them (although I’ll do that a bit, too). It’s more to elaborate on what makes a poor submission to something like this, so that hopefully, if we do an MDA Season 2, they’ll have a better chance at winning that mansion in Provence and the all-expenses paid trip to, uhh, the Bowling Hall of Fame.
Something that was pretty much guaranteed to stop me dead in my tracks while reading a submission was egregiously bad spelling. If you misspelled a word or two, that was fine - everyone does it. But if you wrote something like this:
you have copyed but it desapeared because you copyed another thing
then I didn’t read much farther.
There were quite a lot of submissions to a software contest that involved somehow magically creating new hardware in existing products, most of which had to do with the iPod. For example, this gem:
make the ipod into a cellphone too.
That was the entire submission. Just in case you don’t get why this idea makes the baby Jesus cry, a cellphone is hardware. If your iPod isn’t already a cellphone, we can’t just write some software that will magically give it the ability to communicate with cellphone towers. Hint: It doesn’t even have an antenna.
In all fairness, I think some of the submitters were under the mistaken impression that we are Apple Computer. We are not Apple Computer. We just give them all of our money.
This one stands on its own:
idrugs drugs for computer that give you spacial view things that aren’t really there
Some of them were actually good ideas, just not good for this contest. Like this one:
iSex would be an application that incorporated the Apple iSight. Upon launch of the application information on each of the participants would be intered, i.e. height, weight, age etc.. You would then point the iSight at the bed. The software would then make an educated guess on how long you where having sex, and how many calories you burned based on movement caught by iSight. You could also incorporate this into iTunes to play different playlists based on your tempo while having sex.
This idea is right on soooo many levels!!! Wrong venue, though…
Some might have been good ideas, except that the submitter forgot that whole “telling me what it does” part. Like the following very lyrical, but completely unparsable submission:
With the created universe complete,all floating elements vanish(optional)and what resides in front of me is the final product.Launching the Presentor a outer semi-transparent sphere covering the Constructor smoothly appears.I travel from inside of the Constructor to outer space,viewing the Presentor(and its interface)and inside of it the Constructor: the created universe and the elements surrounding it.The Presentor allows the previously created universe(or any element I have)to be exteriorized to all the available means(PresentationArea;Internet;Print;etc).One possibility I have is to circle the Presentor sphere and choose to present fragments of the created universe,wherever I want it to start or present the complete universe all together Core[Idea]—Inner Part[Mantle]—Crust[Presentor]
Likewise, there were some that might have been good ideas, like this one. If the submitter had told me what the hell an ERP was:
Today a lot of companys selects Windows like the system, because today there are not options for a ERP in OS X system. I am thinking what a ERP who can uses the benefits of OS X in the client and server side, will be great. I think that the better OS in the world is OS X, for that reason, I think that a ERP IN OS X is great opportunity for expand the clients for Apple
Here’s my all-time favorite entry, for a dream app named “Bungee Paradigm”:
Bungee cords are strapped to beavers to facilitate superior Rubik cube solutions. Applications to global socio-economic problems prevalent in theaters of internecine confrontation such as Iraq, natural disasters like tsunami, and the plight of malodorous sea cucumbers are eagerly anticipated.
And here’s the About the Author for that one:
Fantastical character primarily resident in the 7th dimension, though has been oberved sneaking into the 9th on occasion. Prefers a strict diet of chromium and strontium with a weakness for peppermint snapps. Exercises rigorously each day for 3.521 minutes on the odd week in even months if the moon is in the 4 house with Mars ascending, usually.
I too dream of the day that we can join together in imposing the new order paradigm of bungee solutions onto the bourgeouisie proletariat!!!
Finally, there was one that was a pretty good submission overall, but the author just happened to drop into his About the Author that:
my cat’s breath smells like catfood
You owe me a new keyboard, pal!
