Thanks to today’s sponsors: iClip, the multiple clipboard solution for OS X, Awaken, the iTunes compatible alarm clock, and macZOT!, for daily deals on Mac software.
Today’s finalists share a loose theme of changing your Macintosh experience, in small ways or big.
Minerva, by John Bell: Ever since watching 2001: A Space Odyssey, I’ve always daydreamed of having my computer working autonomously and reporting on tasks with a soothing voice. Minerva is reminiscent of HAL without its murderous qualities. Minerva will scan emails and add appointments to your iCal automatically, read you the latest news, remind you of things left on your to-do list, and more, communicating this through Leopard’s VoiceOver technology. You can read the full idea here and check out John’s first blog post here.
My personal thoughts: How cool is this? Lots of Leopard technologies have changed this idea from something I wish could exist into something I want done, now. With system-wide To Do support, RSS classes and VoiceOver, Minerva has suddenly become not only feasible, but potentially killer app quality. It could truly change the way I interact with my Mac. I’d love to wake up each morning, and while browsing the web, have Minerva report to me what I have to do, what appointments are coming up, and important emails that have come in. Or have Minerva’s morning report playing on my iPod while walking to classes. Here’s hoping this finalist goes far.
iSightSee, by Mike Gaboury: New control methods seem all the rage these days. (I’m excited for tomorrow’s Nintendo Wii announcement for example.) Mike’s iSightSee attempts to bring hand gestures and motion control to your Mac. It’s been done before in ToySight, but iSightSee could be used for anything. Wave your hand while clicking around in Safari to open a new tab, control iTunes with another gesture, or even draw in Photoshop using your screen as a virtual easel. It remains to be seen whether hand gestures could replace more traditional control methods, but iSightSee could really work as a supplementary option. You can read the full idea here and check out Mike’s first blog post here.
Development Manager John Casasanta: “iSightSee is yet another entry that we received a zillion duplicate ideas of (along with all the iSight biometric entries, but don’t get me started on those…grrr). Pretty much all of the judges love the concept but the big hurdle here is feasibility. Plain and simple, an iSight gestures app is gonna be hellish to get working smoothly. Most of the other entries focused on having the iSight pick-up on hand or finger movements. Taking a look at something like ToySight, you can see that with the current technology, this isn’t something easily done well.
“But iSightSee was one of the few that went in a bit of a different direction and focused on having a particular color be the focal point for the cam. Based on this, we think this is the most doable of this big pile of similar ideas and we’re happy to have it as one of the final 24.”
SweepIt, by Marshall Kucharczyk: SweepIt shares some of Minerva’s automation ambitions, but focuses on a simpler, but very real problem. I’m talking about cluttered desktops and folders. SweepIt lets users set some rules (an example might be, copy files with a .app extention from open disk images, then eject and trash the disk image file, or send all movie files to your Movies folder), target a few folders, and bam, the problem is solved. You can read the full idea here, and check out Marshall’s first blog post here.
My personal thoughts: I know the problem is probably a bit more severe for me than others (a freshly cleaned Desktop becomes full screen clutter within hours) but ignoring the severity of the prolem for a second, I would guess that it’s a problem nonetheless for most people. The cool part about SweepIt is how potentially customizable the experience can be depending on what you need. For an example, people send me images all the time. I’d love it if I could have all downloaded images moved to an “Images” folder on my Desktop and open in Preview (not Photoshop) without moving a muscle, or have all files older than 2 days in my downloads folder automatically moved to the trash. Small things, but they’d add up to something pretty significant to my workflow (and peace of mind).
Are there really only 6 finalists left? Stay tuned for the final announcements.
