My Dream App

I'm a 23 year old male from North Carolina. I recently graduated with an Information Science degree from UNC Chapel Hill and now have a job as a writer for www.dealnews.com (rather, more appropriately, www.dealmac.com), a great bargain-hunting website.

My two primary areas of interest are information systems and digital photography. Although the only other computer-related job I've had has been tech support in college, I was also a staff photographer for the school newspaper which was a lot of fun.

As far as Macs are concerned, I've been interested in OS X for several years but had always been a PC guy since I was about 15 or so. With the Intel transition I finally took the plunge and couldn't be happier. Now I'm a full-fledged Mac fan and have immersed myself in as much online reading as possible to be as familiar with the Mac platform as I am with Windows. Being able to help out with My Dream App is a great opportunity for me to help out the Mac community.

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.

Cookbook is one of my favorite ideas currently. I could see this being a hit with college-aged people as well as the singles crowd. Especially when you live in a town that doesn’t offer much variety in ways of what restaurants are accessible, cooking your own food becomes a popular thought… but figuring out what and how to cook is another story altogether. Rather than having to search online, I could easily see Cookbook having a massive library of recipes that continues to grow every day with user input. The hard part would change from deciding what you want to eat for the 3rd time this week to which new recipe you want to give a shot. If the final product looks anything close to the current mockups, the app would be near-perfect. Michael has done a fantastic job at giving us a visual aid at what it could be, and that alone makes the idea very exciting. That, plus the power of social contribution (anything social seems to be a hit on the Internet these days), and it’s a heavy-hitter in this competition. I’d really like to see this incorporate a buddy list (or equivalent) feature that would allow you to suggest new recipes to your friends and vice versa. Or, have a random recipe given to you based on certain criteria (or completely randomly). I really like the built-in calendar to schedule what you want to eat so you can go to the store and get the essentials (or perhaps order from Amazon Grocery in time to have it shipped to you), and integrating with iCal and Google Calendar would be a nifty feature as well.

I like the concept behind this idea, but actually getting it created is where I stop and say “hmmm”. I can easily imagine a nicely-designed sticky note that you can place anywhere on-screen on any app (and it hides with the app it’s pinned to, etc). I can even visualize a cool sucking animation to close sticky notes like when you close widgets in the dashboard. What I can’t see is it being feasible in terms of programming it from a 3rd party perspective. The core operating system would seemingly have to be tapped into and would need drastic updating with new releases (theoretically). One thing I like about real-life stickies is that they appear when they’re relevant. For example, I could place one on the fridge to remind me to get some milk- or place one on the dashboard in my car to remind me to get some gas… whatever it may be, when I’m in a situation to take care of it, that’s when I see the note. This would translate well by seeing it on individual apps, but they could also stack up and get lost easily if you don’t access the application very often or take the time to keep them in order, which I doubt many people would want to do.

At first I didn’t really like this idea. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought I might actually use it. I remember when I used the Chia Pet widget in dashboard. Every day I would excitedly open the dashboard to see if it’s grown any and I would water it. Heck, I’d even stop in several times a day to water it just to be sure I didn’t forget earlier or to make sure it registered my click from earlier, etc. When I forgot to water it one weekend and saw it upside dead on that dreadful Monday morning, I was devastated. What had I done to my poor chia pet??

This suspension of disbelief could keep me using the app for a while, I think. My only concern is being able to tell it what programs are considered healthy and which are considered procrastination apps. For example, a typical workday for me involves using a Jabber chatroom and browsing (and typing in) multiple tabs in multiple windows of Firefox. These 2 primary tools for me would equal imminent death for my poor plant since I *have* to use them to do my job. Other than that, it could be intriguing. Once I begin goofing off (maybe you could set specific urls to be considered bad, such as youtube, google video, facebook, etc), perhaps I could audibly hear my plant slowly being wilting, recovering, etc.

I’m not big into the whole idea of GTD. To me, the concept of GTD makes you so focused on getting organized on what you need to do, that you don’t have time to actually do any of it. Unless a clear explanation of how the system works and how to use the software were put into place, I could see many people staring at it blankly as they do with, say, Photoshop- it has so much potential and is so complex, but figuring out how to use for even the most basic task it is a giant feat in and of itself.

That being said, I think it has the potential to be a huge killer app. GTD is a vast topic of discussion these days and productivity seems to be more popular than ever with the public. For people that work solely on the computer this could work very well. For people that have to be away from a computer, it could pose a problem. At this point you could either try to integrate it with a PDA or cell phone, but having to navigate on such a tiny screen could be cumbersome.

This is an idea that I find very interesting, but not one I really see as being such a great idea for its own app. Lots of people enjoy playing games, but many of those same people prefer to have some order to their desktop. To play this game you would have to scatter your desktop icons all over the place and be completely unorganized. Also, what if you’re the type who doesn’t put things on the desktop at all (a minimalist, if you will)? Are you unable to play? “Various types of small soldier and vehicle units navigate around your cluttered desktop in a variable paced battle that you can sit back and watch or take a more active part in.” This sounds like my desktop will take a mind of its own and move my icons around. While it wouldn’t be quite as bad to move them yourself and know where you left them, this would leave you searching for icons since you’d have no idea where they went- assuming it would be possible to allow the app to take control of them. This would function much better in a dashboard-style environment rather than using the actual desktop. Maybe take a replica of your desktop and do this, but leave the real thing alone. Using the laptop motion sensor is a cool idea, but poses a problem when you accidentally drop it on the floor. And not only would ambient noise be a problem, but I’d rather see voice recognition be polished and put to more practical use before being used in a game, personally.

I’ve always been fascinated by apps that have attempted to do this on Windows, but they usually take up a huge amount of resources, have to be an app that you switch over to (and therefore forget about), or just don’t work like they claim to. If this could actually replace the desktop wallpaper and function in realtime, it’d be great. I wonder how processor-intensive that would be, though. And laptop battery life? Goodbye. This is something I’d definitely use, but I don’t know that I’d *keep* using it after the novelty wore off after the first couple of hours. The effects could be wonderful, but after my screen rippled a few times after being hit with the downpour of a rain storm, I’d quickly disable it so I could actually be productive. One of the biggest problems here lies in the fact that weather forecasts are not always accurate. It may say there’s a light rain, but be raining cats and dogs- or it may say it’s snowing when in reality it’s doing nothing at the moment. Plus, these do not accurately portray the volume of precipitation, thus making the incremental changes nearly impossible to represent. Plus, when the weather does not change for long periods of time, it could get very boring looking at the same thing. Then, what happens if I decide to have windows open and not stare at my desktop? I won’t be able to see what’s going on unless I invoke exposé or use my old weather widget (which displays an actual temperature reading, which is helpful).

If this were to become an app, I’d like to see it customizable in that there are various settings you can change. There could be a tropical background, beach background, woods, city, etc based on what’s closest to your actual environment (or what you’d prefer to look at). Additionally, being able to use it as more of a true window would be intriguing- having a living view of a scene with wind blowing, water tides rising and falling, etc.