My Dream App

Cabel Sasser is the co-founder (with Steven Frank) of Panic, makers of "shockingly good Mac software", including the now defunct skinnable MP3 player, Audion, the award-winning FTP client Transmit, and the ultimate Usenet client Unison. Panic also operates a popular t-shirt store called Panic Goods. You can view his personal blog here.

I welcome with open arms any tool that tries to make me more organized! But I have one reservation about this idea — and this is largely a personal problem — to me, Post-It notes are, in a way, the very opposite of organization. They’re 3 inch squares of pastel-packed institutionalized chaos, the paper product demon spawn of Lucifer himself. What starts with one simple Post-It note — “Don’t forget to e-mail Ged!” — quickly devolves into four hundred incomprehensible notes saying things like “magic beans” and “do thing”.

If Stick-It extends Stickies to be attachable to any application, in menus, or hidden, or popping up all over the place, I really worry that it’s only electronicifying the very worst thing about Stickies: that the little bastards show up everywhere. For people like myself who obviously can’t be trusted to handle Post-It notes responsibly, I’d really like to see this idea try to tackle that problem of Stickies being messy, while still keeping the core idea of handy notes that are contextually sensitive system-wide. What about an option for a Dashboard-like layer just for stickies, and nothing else? Or what if the stickies are represented by a simple and unobtrusive icon, and a mouse over or a key press pops them up? Or what if there’s a better visual metaphor for these kind of reminders than large, screen-blocking sticky notes — maybe it’s time to leave the Post-It metaphor behind, like if a subtle bar slides up from the bottom of the screen when you encounter a reminder or note, leaving after a few seconds? Just thinking out loud, but I think this idea is on the right track and could grow into something amazing if you just think a bit out of the 3″ pale-yellow box…

Unless I feel like dressing up for a fancy day, my wardrobe stress generally centers around which Panic t-shirt to wear today. I’ve also been known to optimize the dressing process by double-daying my outfits, which I’m ashamed to admit. But you can see why I wasn’t sure I’d be very qualified to comment on this idea — until my fianceé was checking out the list of My Dream App contestants and let me know that, actually, she really liked this idea. And that said a lot to me. For a long time I’ve actually been wondering how to make software that appeals to a broader range of Mac customers. It’s something we at Panic haven’t figured out yet. And not to get too videogame-y, but Nintendo has found a way to make video games appeal to all manner of new demographics. (Their latest killer app, actually, is an interactive cookbook.) Why can’t we do this with Mac apps? Is it even possible? It seems like a giant untapped market, one that is understandably tough to tap because we’re all just making the apps that we want, and, let’s face it, we’re all just a bunch of dumb guy-nerds. iStyleIt — which I suggest you could very safely rename to just “Style”, ditch the dreaded “i” and becoming catchier in the process — could potentially unlock a whole new audience of shareware customers. Or, it could only sell about 10 copies. Still, I’d love to see someone give it a shot, and a “virtual closet” that applies a bit of Delicious Logic and makes for a very specialized, very cool database, sounds like a great place to start to reach those potential new customers.

Fun fact! Dave, one of our brilliant Panicgineers and the guy behind Unison, basically already wrote this app. Well, he never took it much further than “idea proof” beta phase, but it’s around here somewhere. He was code-goofing around and came up with an idea where you can basically draw points on a waveform to define frequencies as note triggers. So, if tapping the desk just right makes a sound at x frequency on a waveform, you just mark that as your “bass drum” trigger, and you can bass drum away by simply tapping. I bring this up only because it means that this idea — which might at first seem technically ridiculous — is actually probably quite possible and could be amazingly awesome. And, of course, great minds think alike.

I’m always thinking about clever ways to solve the problem of work procrastination. I’m one of these guys who will accomplish a task on my to-do list, then immediately take a reward of ten minutes of stupid web browsing, like a mouse eating a piece of e-cheese. Thus, I think this idea is really quite clever — if I know I’m going to be killing a beautiful flower on my desktop by arguing about video games on the internets for twenty minutes, I honestly (honestly!) might think twice about it and go back to work. It’s a great way to try to exercise on-task self-control in a fun way — without resorting to, you know, firewalls or electric shock therapy. I’m not entirely sure it would be a huge seller, because it’s really not the kind of thing anyone wants to admit to paying for. But, if it was cheap and cheerful enough, it could find an audience.

If I may, I’d like to see the plant be 3D via OpenGL, so you could easily rotate it and set an angle that looks best, with a nice shadow underneath it so it really looks like it is sitting on your desktop. Maybe add a way to publish your plant status — iChat picture? Web page? — so your friends can ridicule you when your plant dies after 2 days. And what if you can fully customize and trade plants with friends? Don’t forget to include a couple super-cute, cartoon-styled plants, for kids, Japan, and me.

I need this application, and it could change a lot of lives, which sounds like ridiculous hyperbole but I think is really quite true. Here are my only suggestion: for people not aware of the GTD concept in detail, such as myself, build in the best, most conversational, most friendly tutorial of all time on first launch, so that basically you’re getting trained by the application. (And please consider another name, because it’s time to officially declare genocide on all iNames from here on out. iCan’t take them seriously!)

I love that people are excited about eBooks, ePaper, and the like. Technology is awesome. But I’m going to give it to you straight, and hope this over-dramatic call doesn’t bite me on the ass later: nobody wants to read books on an electronic device, and all of these ideas will fail. Wow! I totally sound like notable e-curmudgeon John Dvorak now! Sorry. I just don’t think anyone in the world is sitting around saying, “Man, I really love this romance novel, I just wish it was on a computer screen!” Now, there are some good points here. You can’t search books instantly, and that’s a major strike against them — technical volumes are great electronically. And for people with disabilities, or otherwise have trouble reading, reading books on the computer makes perfect sense. But for everyone else? I’m genuinely impressed with the work Dillon has put into thinking about this idea, and directly addressing head-on why Bookroom might be better than a good old fashioned book. And he had me more convinced than I’ve ever been. But at the end of the day, I just can’t see it happening, except in very special situations, and my argument can be boiled down to one ultimate point: you can read a book at the beach. No glare, perfect crisp text, infinite battery life, safely storable in sand, and you look like a jackass reading it. So, I encourage Dillon to try to solve Sasser’s eBook Beach Conundrum. Many many scientists and medical researchers have tried and, sadly, all have failed.

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.