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My Dream App For the Mac
Steve Streza writes "My Dream App, a Mac contest in search of the next killer app, features Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki, and Xbox and zune creator J. Allard as guest judges for its final round. Visitors can vote for their 3 favorite app ideas, and receive free licenses to both Overflow 2 and the Apple Design Award winning PhotoPresenter. Voting is open until Tuesday at 8:00 PM EDT, at which point the three winners will be announced. The winners, who will have emerged from an initial pool of more than 2,700 entrants, will see their app idea realized as a Mac shareware application and earn royalties on sales. "
It seems to me that more and more companies are running dry in the innovation department. I think its a combination of a few things. 1) Companies aren't listening to what consumers want. 2) Their creative talent is aging and young blood is harder to keep. 3) They're skimping on R&D money. Much lack of innovation might clear up by solving one of the three problems. I find it pretty pathetic that a company has to say to its customers, "We got nothin'. If you help us we'll give you royalties." However, at the same time. It would be fun to participate and at least there is a real payoff for the participants who win, so it isn't all bad.
One day the toilets of the world will rise up... And I'm going to nuke them.
Maybe if they have a contest for a 'killer app', one of the choices should actually BE a 'killer app'.
The only ones that come close to useful is file sync and the music maker. And they're far from 'killer app' status. Nobody is going to convert from PC to Mac because it has some sync software or music, especially when other software already exists for that platform and others.
The others are all in the 'ooh eyecandy' category.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Give the people what they really want!
Software that's free, not shareware?
I hate to point out the obvious, but if you have a trillion dollar idea, why aren't you working on it right now? And if you're just sitting on such an idea because you're lazy, risk averse, or not a good enough programmer, you may as well give it to Steve Jobs. It's doing no good rattling around in your head.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
How exactly is Apple making money on this?
Except for the fact that these applications are Mac applications, and are therefore run on Apple hardware, as far as I know Apple has absolutely nothing to do with this.
The Finder needs some work; specifically, the inability to refresh and find a file that I *KNOW* makes me want to chuck it out a window.
There are other problems too, it seems to hang sometimes, and it's very difficult to figure out the key combo that lets me empty the trash of files that are orphan-locked.
Also, the finder can get into a state where the highlighted shortcut in the left panel doesn't correspond to the directory being displayed in the right panel. This should never happen.
But gimme a goddamned refresh button before you do anything else.
A virtual plant? That's about as pointless as a virtual bicycle.
(Also, it's "Mac" not "MAC", and Woz didn't create it, he created the original Apple/Apple II systems-- singlehandedly)
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Maybe the term was being used incorrectly, but I certainly remember a time (about ten years ago I'd guess) when the term freeware was never really used and everything was almost exclusively called shareware. Of course, I was about nine at the time so it could just be forgetfulness on my part.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Are you kidding? That's what software patents are for. You can be lazy, frightened, and a terrible programmer and still make millions!
I just looked the killer apps. None of them look like trillion or even million dollar ideas to me.
At best they are cute widgets or small desktop apps.
I mean weather on your desktop and the ultimate cookbook?
The comment is funny but this contest looks like it might be a bit of fun. Let's face it ideas are cheap.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
People want to write. So we have word-processors. Check.
People want to make pictures, both moving and static. So we have graphics manipulators.
People want to make sounds and music. We have software to serve in this capacity.
People want to do complex maths and book-keeping. Done.
People want to amuse themselves. Games. Done.
People want to communicate. Again, done. We call it the 'internet'
People want to spend money. Yup. Done that.
And people want the construction software to be able to program all of the above. Done, done, done!
So what's left?
People also want to eat, sleep, transport themselves and have sex.
Well, until you can make a food replicator, the eating thing is probably not going to see a revolution any time soon through computers. Sleep is pretty much automatic, (thank-goodness!), I guess there's aviation and transport technologies software already, so that's another done thing, (though GPS was sort of cool). --And I guess you could arguably say that sex has been amply covered by the net already.
So what's left? What need is this new killer app going to fill?
I suppose you could do one of the above things better, more integrated, with prettier colors. The iPod was a good example of re-packaging existing technology. Yay for Jobs.
And realistically, re-packaging existing ideas is all that's left, (until a genius comes along and shows us all wrong, of course.)
Google was one of those. --They gave us a way to effectively search through all the mountains of stuff generated by all the people scurrying to fill all the nooks and crannies created by the main list of things we wanted computers to do.
So what haven't we done yet?
What do we want to do?
AI is a big one. It's not here yet. (Thank goodness!)
Mind-reading hardware and software. There could be a future in that, but it's a bit far off, and again, thank-goodness for that!
Thinking more realistically, Video on Demand in whatever form it eventually takes will probably be big. YouTube offered us a glimpse of that, but it wasn't exactly an app. Maybe Apple or somebody will rig a system where all the currents of money and data flow according to the approval of the power-brokers of the media and hardware universe. That's clearly in the works right now.
But really. . . What's left? What do you really wish your computer could do that it can't do already?
Maybe it's like the typewriter. It's done. Anybody can now type. Maybe what it comes down to is people focusing less on the tools themselves and more on their getting down to the hard work of actually using them.
Just a thought.
-FL
To each their own, i guess. I love path finder on my 12inch powerbook (also 1024x768). The tabs are fantastic, and the shell drawer is nice for quick shell work w/o even having to open a terminal. Filter by name is great too, and much faster than spotlight. Real permissions info, custom colors + transparency,secure delete, etc etc. It fixes most of my gripes about the finder (including this one) and the UI is customizable, and is actually fairly similar to the finder UI. In most cases, the features it duplicates, it does in less space...
That said, I agree with your main sentiment that cmd-r should work in the finder (or the finder should jsut plain old work as someone else pointed out.)
As for not installing shareware, isn't that what this whole article is about? If you're happy with windows explorer, stick with that. Personally, I'll take path finder (or the regular finder, or a sharp stick in the eye) instead.