My Dream App

Okay, so now that we’re into the Finals, it’s time for me to come out and say which contestants I want to win! I really dig all of them, so this is a toughie to do.

First, a note: This is completely subjective, and it’s my opinion, not the opinion of the My Dream App Team in general. My opinion is based on two factors - selfishness and altruisism, with selfishness strongly in the lead! I’m picking the apps that I think will make me the most amount of scratch with the least amount of work, and if they change the world in the process, that’s a great bonus.

For the mathematically inclined, you can think about it like this:

appeal = w1 * easeOfProgramming + w2 * potentialEarnings + w3 * socialGood


where the w’s are weighting factors. w1 and w2 are pretty much equal, and greater than w3.

As Colbert says, moooving on:

Hijack

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!

Cookbook

This one is an easy winner. The potential market is large, and if executed well (functional, beautiful and EASY), Cookbook should enjoy good, steady sales. It’s not going to be gigantic, but it’ll sell well unless we really screw things up. And if we can create a community around RecipeCasting or RecipeSS, it’ll grow, and grow well. And it’ll make people happy along the way.

More importantly, there are no large technical challenges to writing it. There’s a lot of work there, certainly - it’s a large program. But it’s all completely conventional code and techniques. Lots of the development time can, and should, be spent on design and workflow analysis.

Ease Of Programming: high
Potential Earnings: high
Social Good: moderate

Finally, Michael looks like he’ll be absolutely stellar to work with during development! His ability to simplify a complex idea into a UI that seems simple yet is still powerful is absolutely first rate, and he’s been completely receptive and friendly all the way through.

Easy to code, easy to sell. Vote for Cookbook!

Atmosphere

The third choice was a toughie. It was Atmosphere, Whistler or Portal - I’ve been oscillating between all three for weeks. Basically, my formula saved me - Atmosphere is fairly simple to code and it will sell fairly well. But it ain’t gonna change the world… If the wind had blown slighly harder over New Zealand yesterday, Whistler would be in this spot.

That said, Atmosphere’s a pretty cool idea. And some of the algorithmic stuff would be pretty fun to code - fractal clouds, algorithmic snowflakes, sporadic OpenGL leaf surfaces randomly shifted and overlayed to build up fallen leaves.

And, I foresee a ton of creativity coming from graphics designers creating new desktop packages - we’ll have to make sure that we make the system really open and really easy to use, while remaining powerful. Unfortunately, Atmosphere won’t foster any creativity from users - it’s a passive experience for them.

Ease Of Programming: moderate
Potential Earnings: moderate
Social Good: low

Finally, Cameron seems only fairly good to work with. He’s enthusiastic, which is good, but he seems a bit less engaged than some of the other contestants. I get the impression he’s more interested in the cash than in making a great app.

Vote for Atmosphere!

Whistler

Damn it, I really wanted to put this in my list of “vote fors”. I would absolutely love to code this. At the same time, I’m completely terrified of coding this. It’s hard, and it’s right at the edge of my abilities. It would really be work. At the same time, I’m completely confident that I could pull it off, and the result would be amazing.

The reason this one stayed out of my list of winners is the potential market - I just don’t think it’s big enough. MDA is all about creating consumer-level apps, so we’d be priced fairly low, which helps a bit to broaden the market, but not that much. I just can’t see Whistler having amazing sales, and the sales would need to be amazing to offset the amount of work necessary to create it.

Which sucks, because the amount of social good that could come from Whistler is gigantic. Huge. Whistler could change people’s lives, for the better, launch new careers, bring happiness to people. Damn it.

Ease Of Programming: miniscule
Potential Earnings: moderate
Social Good: huge

Finally, Richard seems like he’d be very good to work with. His design skills are phenomenal. My only complaint is that he still seems somewhat nebulous on Whistler’s feature list, but I suspect he’s done that on purpose and that once it came time to begin development, it would sort itself out.

Don’t vote for Whistler. But I secretly hope that you do anyway. I want it, and I want to code it.

Portal

I also had a really hard time not putting this one into my list of “vote fors”. At the beginning of the competition, I was completely unenthusiastic about it. But since then, Farzad has put a ton of effort into it and has been amazingly polite, enthusiastic, and receptive along the way, and I’ve really warmed up to it as a result.

Is Portal needed? Absolutely! Do I want to write it? Nope. The concept just doesn’t excite me. Moving files back and forth ain’t sexy. The UI has promise, lots of it, but it ain’t there yet and the enthusiasm I have is mainly of the “could be” variety. The syncing animations (the wormholes) have never appealed to me, and I’m someone who likes gratuitous eye candy!

Coding Portal is moderately complicated as it involves lots of low-level file system notification stuff and lots of high level networking stuff. I think Portal would sell fairly well, but not hugely. And, unfortunately, nobody is going to wet their pants over how Portal has changed their lives.

I’d hit it, but I don’t have a crush on it.

Ease Of Programming: low
Potential Earnings: moderate
Social Good: low

Finally, Farzad seems like he’d be phenomenal to work with! As I said, his enthusiasm, receptiveness and amenability have all been first rate.

Don’t vote for Portal…

Blossom

I’m kind of sad about Blossom, as I’m the one who pushed for it to become a finalist. I still love the idea - using positive feedback to increase productivity by way of an emotional attachment. Psychologically, it’s brilliant, and looking at historically similar ideas, I think it would sell like a mofo.

That said, it’s really hard to code and it’s got to be just right or it won’t sell at all. The plant algorithms are hard, obviously. They’ve got to be compelling and interesting, and continually so. Getting it right would take a lot of work.

Collecting the performance metrics (is an app/window good or bad) is hard too, as it involves lots of weirdness with the Accessibility APIs and lots of special case code. More hard coding.

Moreover, Blossom would need a gadjillion special case things to keep the user interested. Cutesy things like a bee occasionally coming to investigate a flower, or a snail slowly making its way up the tree, stuff like that. Each of those is coding time, and it would need a ton of surprises like that to keep the user engaged over a long time span.

But my big problem with Blossom is that I just don’t like how it’s been fleshed out over the course of this contest. It’s become less compelling to me than it was at the beginning. I’m just not enthusiastic about it anymore.

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

Finally, I didn’t really ever get a sense of how Dan would be to work with. I’m not sure why - he’s been active during the course of the contest. Maybe it’s because I don’t feel as though I have personally interacted with him much.

Don’t vote for Blossom…