My Dream App

Before I signed up for MDA I was always more of a lurker-type in forum boards. I can count on one hand how many forums I’m actually a registered member of. I never really frequented them on such a regular basis as to need to set up an account to get involved in the community–basically, I was a human scraper–I got what I needed, and then I was gone. After spending two-plus months submerged in the MDA forums, I have a new appreciation for what Hijack would bring to the table. At first, I recognized Hijack as a good idea and saw its appeal to a certain segment, but now I need it. Yeah, this does have a limited appeal, but for those who fall into that category of need–the appeal is irresistible and if it works past the demo cycle, it’s worth laying down some hard-earned cash.

As for feasibility issues, I’m with Kevin on this in that I have to believe Jason Harris when he says it’s feasible. If it wins, it’s on his shoulders to make it work–you’ll have to blame Jason and not Kevin (no pressure Jason). I’m not going to tell him it’s impossible and you’re not going to be able to maintain it, blah, blah, etc., etc. Let them rise to the challenge–the challenge is there. This is a true Dream App and needs to be developed. And plus, I’m pretty sure Kevin said he’s gonna buy a case of beer for whoever votes for Hijack! Count me in! ;)

like cookbook, i’m torn if this app is needed with the advent of ajax-like development models and the constant evolution of the major forum packages. however, unlike cookbook, i think there is a real unaddressed need that this app can help with. the lack of consistency in ux and features between forums is frustrating and i’m sure most users enlist several sites to keep up with their interests and topics. the idea of having one consistent ux across different threads and the ability to do cross forum search and pivots would be great. i was surprised by the number of feasibility challenges brought against this concept. aside from cookbook, i thought it had similar difficulty relative to the other finalists. i think you could take a tiered approach to tackling the scraping. 1) connecting with the top forum packages out there and enlist them to support/standardize around some tag convention, 2) create a community service that people could submit their scraped sites (a la cddb) and 3) as a last resort have the end user scrape and support a blacklist of sites which don’t work so that you don’t pollute the ui with negative/random results. my biggest concern with this app is how website owners would feel about you hijacking their sites… given the effort many of them put into theming their sites and their reliance on advertising, this could pose a real problem. while i thought the eye candy was a bit excessive, the video mockups were a great touch to help see your vision.

I know there’s been feasibility concerns raised by many, many people, but the person who would be developing this (Jason Harris) has made a career out of doing impossible things, and he’s spent some time looking into how this would be done, and knows exactly how to do it. And if this wins and gets developed into an app, I will be using it daily. I’m tired of having to deal with the often clunky web UI’s of discussion forums, and with Hijack helping me manage all of them, I’d be able to keep track of things that interest me much more efficiently as well.

I’m convinced at this point that Hijack’s doable. One common misconception among the naysayers is regarding the huge difference between screen scraping and DOM scraping.

But it’s gonna be hard to implement. I’d expect Hijack to take over a year to get done since a big part of it would be the training functionality. The training mode video looks like it’ll be a piece of cake, but it’s a gross oversimplification of how it’d really work.

Looking at it from a business point of view, I don’t see this one being a great choice. It’s going to take a ridiculous amount of time and support. And if you look at the primary target market, which is the youger crowd who generally don’t have a lot of money to throw at frivilous software purchases, it just doesn’t help Hijack’s case.

So I have to say that Hijack’s not one of the apps that i’d like to see win the contest. I will say that Kevin’s been a great contender. Even though Hijack’s not one of my favorites, I feel that Kevin would be great to work with as he’s very passionate about Hijack.

Looking at it from a developer’s point ov view, I personally don’t see it as being a desirable project to work on. Jason’s been adamantly defending Hijack for a while and he’ll likely be the one on our team to develop this if it wins. He’s never one to back away from a tough challenge so this may be right up his alley. Or maybe not…time will tell. I just hope he remembers the saying, “Be careful of what you wish for because you just might get it.”

I’m sure this would be a hit with folks who spend lots of time in forums. The difficulty is getting it to work in all those forums/sites. If it can work, and work well, I think there is an audience for it.

If I were into message boards, I would use this. The issue is that I’m not into message boards. It’s got to be useful for anyone who is.

Let’s assume for a second that HIjack can be done perfectly. Work with every forum system. Parse every attribute, avatar, signature, and customized element out there perfectly. For the people who visit a lot of forums, it would be a great tool — there’s absolutely no argument about that. The problem I see is that most people don’t read forums, and those that do tend to read under 5 or so. The only real value this app offers is to people who are browsing/participating in quite a few forums. While I’m confident a market exists (and the MDA voters probably represent a good amount of it), I can’t see average people visiting enough forums to justify trying out this app. Kudos to Kevin for coming up with a good idea with some amazing mockups, and it’s an app I’d love to use myself… just when looking at the target audience a “dream” app should have, this seems far too niche.

Hijack is cool but I think the UI challenges are very large. I also am with some of the other judges here that if this becomes really needed it’ll be built into Safari quickly or, one of my favorite applications, Salling Clicker, will probably do a better job and have it work with your bluetooth cell/mice/keyboard devices also.

It’s probably no surprise that I want this one to get made, since I’ve been pimping it for the whole competition. One more time, all together now: “IT IS FEASIBLE!!!”

Hijack was impossible five years ago, but two things have made it possible today: the rise of semantic web programming (read, CSS) and WebKit, which can do the heavy lifting for us. Put ‘em together and DOM scraping becomes eminently feasible. Identification is the tough part, but it’s not insurmountable.

Hijack’s hard to code, granted. But its potential earnings are huge. Seriously, take a look at this Internet of ours. Every big site has a forum. Why? People use ‘em, people like ‘em. The number of Mac users on the Internet is but a fraction, and the number of Mac users who use forums is but a fraction, and the number of Mac forum users who’d buy Hijack is but a fraction. But the initial pool of people is so huge that even a fraction works out to a huge potential audience. And the idea is compelling enough to change the industry and raise all of those percentages.

Finally, Kevin looks like he’ll be absolutely stellar to work with during development! His design skills are amazing, and he’s been receptive, friendly and funny. A++, would vote again.

Ease Of Programming: low
Potential Earnings: huge
Social Good: high

It’s the creation of a new genre. Vote for Hijack!

I can’t help myself but I’m still not into forums. Hijack is quite a cool idea nonetheless. A lot has been talked about its feasability and while there won’t be a clean way for every forum it should be possible. The recently suggested training mode is a very neat idea. Along with the mock-ups this shows how the idea evolved.

I think Hijack is an awesome idea. I spend my day trolling or contributing in about half a dozen different forums and would love something that would make that process easier. The main problems I have now is that the features and capabilities of each forum software are different — some I can use HTML, others I need to use BBcode to format text and URLs. Some offer better tracking for threads or collections of messages posted since my last visit than others. Something that helps consolidate and manage that process of reading and contributing has significant value. I’m not totally sold on the mockups I’ve seen, but the concept is a winner.

<sigh> Feasibility issues just keep on coming up with this one no matter how loudly I shout that I know how to code it. IT’S FEASIBLE!!!! DOM scraping! Aaarrgghh! I swear it’s true!

As someone who posts in several message boards and watches many more, I like this idea, but you’ll never get it working. There are a dozen different popular message board programs, and every installation is slightly different. To make things worse, there’s no standard for message board RSS feeds, either. I’d hate to have to be the developer who has to scrape all the data from these boards, let alone try to keep up with the changes. This is a app that will fail far more often than it will work.

I would buy this app the minute it was available. I’m on so many forums ranging from Macs to Guitars that I forget half the places I’m a member. The layout is great — familiar to those using RSS applications with a very Apple-like interface. I also like that it has so much of a focus — while I’m a little concerned about how it would support so many different forum packages, I’d like to see this one in development.

I don’t really have much to say about Hijack mainly because I don’t regularly go to a lot of forums. Don’t take this as me being negative toward it…I think for the people who do, it’s a great concept.

The reason I’m commenting here this week is because of Austin’s comment. Reminiscent of how George Bush has repeatadly tried to convince us of the US’s justification for preemptive war, Jason spent the past several weeks trying to convince us of the feasibility of Hijack. So I found it pretty funny that Austin comes in this week and basically shoots it all down.

But the one big difference between Jason’s argument and Bush’s is that I actually believe Jason.

People are going to hate me for saying it but I’m not really a fan of this idea. The obvious is that it’s going to be nigh impossible to actually make it work with a majority of forums out there. Assuming it’s possible to pull some magic and get the compatibility to a decent level, I still see no benefit to browsing through your forums in this interface. I’m all for Front Rowing things but if you can’t reply and be part of the community with it, what’s the point? The standard browser looks just like Mail and fails to inspire me at all. I realize the core idea is decent, but it just seems like it all relies on some non existent forum web service. And really, even if it appeals to a bunch of readers here, how many people actually read that many forums? I don’t see how a dream app can have such a small target audience.

Consider me among the disbelievers. First, I’m not sure there’s really a strong need for this app. But more importantly, I just don’t believe it would ever work reliably, and it’d be a bear to keep it up to date. (I realize that Jason Harris says it’ll work, but I’m just not convinced that it can be made to work and be a good user experience and be maintainable by a development team.) If the makers of forum software packages adhered to some sort of standard for publishing their data, that would be one thing. I’d love to be proven wrong, but right now I think this is a disaster waiting to happen.

Wow, I would really like to have this one. Forget feasibility—that’s not my job. The idea is delicious. Just one thing: how will you feel in 2008 when Apple rolls it into Safari?

Lovely screenshots, though I’m concerned about the technology behind it. I think that the logistics of making it screenscraping based would be pretty tricky, which means that to make this work you’d need to have it be more WebKit centric, which means that the actual threads would look a lot like the original message board, rather than this.

This idea continues to rock. But the feasibility of this idea keeps getting brought up over and over again, and I keep saying it can be done without too much trouble, in a variety of ways. So that’s all I’ll say this time around - this idea is fully implementable by the MDA team. Go Hijack!

This is my favorite idea among contestants. It grabbed my attention with two things: it’s purpose and it looks. I spend a lot of time (which I will never get back) at forums, and an application which puts all my favorite places in one interface is something that’s missing from my Apps folder. Mockups which Kevin has shown so far are very impressive. Everything seems to be very well thought out, logically connected and the overall looks…I admit that I’m a sucker for slick, plastic/metallic stuff with desaturated colors and darker areas which boost the overall contrast. CSS support sounds like a killer feature which will attract many people as most Mac users care about aesthetics of their desktops. Front Row-like interface which I saw in motion looks great too although I’m not sure about usability here - I for one would never sit back on my couch to read posts. Forums are for communication, not only reading after all. Although if Hijack introduces a way to write posts with wireless keyboard on my lap, I’m all for it. Nevertheless I’m in a deep love with this concept and I hope it will win.

I’d probably post on more forums if this were made, I really don’t like some of the default forum styles out there and then you have to go to each one individually and it can take forever.

I haven’t been an avid user of web forums so far. Part of the reason is probably the crappy user experience most of them have. Hijack should solve this problem by providing a great interface to the as many of the online forums as possible. Some judges think that interfacing with all the kinds of forums out there shouldn’t be a problem and some think it will be a very cumbersome and difficult. I think it can be done but probably not the elegant and clean way which I definitely prefer. Marketability shouldn’t be an issue for Hijack because a lot of people like to see and buy such an app but I’m personally not so much into it.

The latest video mock-ups of this app have really helped to visualize it and put a “face” on the software. I can see this application having a real, productive use that thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of users would like to have at their fingertips. There might be a temptation however to go overboard with the UI and over eye-candy it a bit I think. Its usability is paramount to its success or failure. It must be super-easy to use and navigate and should just “work” in order for it to become anything more than a techie’s wet dream. Unison is a nice example of what I’m talking about here. Panic did a great job of making something technical and remote, easy to understand and navigate and the same would have to be said of Hijack I think.

This would be a useful app to those who participate in a number of forums and as someone who’s been flamed to death over the years it would be nice to be able to keep track of who’s been naughty and who’s been nice. Having said that, I’m a bit confused as to how this app works - the contestant himself states that certain key aspects of it’s operation remain ‘nebulous’. Unfortunately I also find the main app interface as it currently exists a bit confusing - it’s very unintuitive and I’m not sure the benefits of the application are compelling enough to make me want to go through the hassle of figuring it out rather than just launch a browser and go. In terms of appearance, the controls and graphics as they stand are rendered in a style I would find jarring in the Aqua environment… I like the colors, but the appearance effects (implied depth and virtual materials) of the buttons and display regions seem out of place on the Mac. I really really dig the Front Row style ‘play’ mode sample - in fact, I’d rather see the entire app integrated into this style of interface somehow.

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.

Like Brent, I would use this application myself. Unlike Brent, I don’t think it’s too hard to attempt an implementation. This idea has two things going for it in 2006. First, there’s a heck of a lot of existing, open source code out there to help read and parse the tag soup that makes up the web. Second, in today’s network-connected world, it’s possible to push updates frequently.

For example, it seems like every time I launch NetFlix Freak, the application tells me there’s an updated version of itself. If this update process is seamless, it doesn’t bother me. In fact, it actually makes me feel good. “Oh, my application is improving itself!”

A successful design for Hijack depends on a good initial framework for screen-scraping that makes the inevitable and frequent updates as trivial for the developer to create as they are for the customers to automatically download and install. Some sort of text-based description file for each bulletin board product would be a good start, with procedural code handling the nastier bits when necessary. To do the scraping, run a full WebKit instance “invisibly” to evaluate the page just as Safari would, then scrape that (virtual) screen.

And yeah, start leaning on the top web board developers to provide a real API for this stuff. But in the meantime, screen-scrape away. It’s just text. Don’t fear it; conquer it!

Hijack is another one of my top favorites at the moment. I must admit, I’m a web forum junkie, and it gets tedious having to visit half a dozen or more forums in order to check up on my subscribed threads. I’ve tried RSS, but unless there’s something I’m missing, most forums only offer a feed to the whole forum- not just the topics you want to read up on… and that’s annoying because RSS lets you centralize a lot of content to save time. I see Hijack as being sort of like this in that I could go into this app and have immediate access to all of the threads I want to read; and a client-side app for this would be great. The main problem I could foresee would be getting it to integrate with forums that use who knows what back-end software. Many popular ones use vBulletin, but there are the few out there that use obscure software that might not play so well with being parsed into a 3rd party application. The bookmark idea to show where you left off would be great, as it’s hard to find exactly where you left off when many new posts were made since your last visit. This could be opened up to the community to allow user-made templates to be created and distributed to allow certain parts of the UI to look how the user prefers. For example, I’m not too fond of the huge speech balloons that take up so much space in the current mockup. Allowing users to alter that to have it show more content in a screen would be useful (as well as letting them display the thread however they want). Being able to keep up on things other than forums (blog posts, flickr sets, etc) would be a cool way to go, as well as showing how many new “messages” are available on the dock icon (which could be toggled so you don’t go crazy). Growl integration here for notifications would be a thought as well.

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.

Before I started doing Mac software as a hobby, I operated a few discussion forums and always wondered about the possibility of building a client-side application. It’s a solid idea, for sure. I think the stumbling block thus far hasn’t been lack of will (there’s a LOT of forum users out there, after all), but the fact that there’s no APIs to hook into. I’d love it, but I don’t know if it’s technically possible.

I would like this app myself, but I fear that the amount of work makes it way too expensive right now. There isn’t a standard API for reading and writing to forums, so this app would have to do a ton of screen-scraping, and it would have to be able to deal with all the different forum software and all the possible customizations people could do to their forums.

A standard API for forums would be totally cool — and then this app would be do-able. But we don’t have that today.

I’m not sure why I like this idea, but I do. It must be some suppressed caveman dislike of online forums, and any effort to make them better has to be good. Right?

Feature wise, archiving of the data is a must. Search using Spotlight or Search Kit would be super cool as well.

But how would the interaction with the online bits of it be done? Each forum software does things a little differently, so I’m thinking there must be some sort of plugin architecture to get the most bang for the buck. I’m also thinking that most forum software probably has some anti-spam measurements and will make developing Hijack a bit of a pain in the butt. The programmer in me fears writing this app.

I love the idea of a really great native interface to a bulletin board, though I am concerned about the feasibility of trying to parse through the variety of board layouts out there. (Even when they’re powered by the same engine, they tend to have a lot of different themes. But perhaps many of those themes share common style names, in which case perhaps it’s a lot easier than it would have been pre-CSS.)

I like the concept behind this idea a lot, but I’d like to see it get fleshed out more. Right now, it seems as though it’s trying to be a jack of all trades and a master of none. My conception is that its reason for existing is to abstract websites to which one commonly posts content into a unified interface. That’s it.

So here’s what it needs: A list of the sites its tracking. These can be forums, myspace, friendster, flickr sets, whatever. It needs some way of indicating whether there’s new content available for each of these sites.

Then, for the selected site, it should show the current posts, or pics, or whatever. Each “genre” of site (blogs, forums, photo archives) should present its content in the same interface. There should (optionally) be a way of seeing where you left off last time. There should be a way of posting new content.

That’s it.

This is an amazing idea. And, actually, there’s some precedence for success here: there’s a Mac OS X app in Japan used for reading 2chan, which is essentially Japan’s national web message board, as in, like, the entire country posts on it. Noby, our Japanese guy, uses this software daily, and while it looks and behaves a lot like Mail and could use some interface improvements, I’m always jealous that I don’t have something like that for the forums I troll on a regular basis. So, what more can I say? Make this program, and make it good, and I will use it often, as well, I’m guessing, many many others.