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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. "
Here's his review of the virtual plant idea from the article-
-Steve Wozniak (Apple) - Finals:
-This would only be remotely entertaining if the plant was marijuana or opium and when you did -certain things like actually work, you killed your crop. Maybe you could make virtual cash and -compete online for the best cash crop. In order to grow the weed and heroin you have to browse -certain web sites that would require you be smoking weed to start with; like the Microsoft.com -Vista developer site.
I know he's never been the CEO type, but for the inventor of the MAC and a former teacher, I thought this was a bit crass. I wouldn't want to publish an app with someone who thought this was an appropriate public pronouncement. He sounds like a Slashdot troll.
"Don't you know you're going to shock the monkey?"- Peter Gabriel
"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." thats what bungee cord is for. That line of thought is beside the point :) don't you think they should have ... you know real incentives rather than some cheasy licenses. maybe .. you know I hear people like money?
I can see the voiceover now:
This is the search for the next killer app...
16 contestants. The best of them will get to show a collection of apps at MacWorld Expo, and the winner will receive $100,000 to start their own line of software and a new VW Rabbit with iPod connectivity.
Steve Jobs, Guy Kawasaki, and Steve Wozniak will judge the contestants' performance each week in a series of challenges. Each week, there will be one winner and one loser (who gets to go home), because in the world of software design, you're either in, or you're out.
Sent from my iPhone
if there was a contest where you were asked to give up an idea for, say, a chance to win a year's worth of professional retouching, it would be a great idea for people who would value that service. for me, as a graphic designer and retoucher, it's obviously not worth it to give up IP to gain something i could easily do on my own to a higher standard. but i'd at least recognize that it's a useful prize to some people.
Put the weather on your desktop.A virtual window to the outdoors for your desktop. View a virtual representation of your area's weather when too busy to go outside.
Too bust to go outside? WTF? Look out the window you lazy sow! NOT a killer app - more of a stupid idea, along the lines of Segway
Blossom
A virtual plant that responds to productivity, not sunlight and water. Had a good session in Excel? Your plant will thrive. Play too much Warcraft? Expect some withering.
Suck great steaming tourdes out of the boss's ass? Instant rainforest. Write 3000 lines of code? A garden of flowers? But what if all the code is crap? Does Blossom do QA? A REALLY bad idea, and impossible to properly implement. Blossom is fascism with a happy face - "here come the suede denim secret police! ... California! Uber Alles!"
Whistler
Music creation has never been this easy or fun. Ever had the urge to create a song until you realized it was harder than it was worth? With Whistler, just whistle, hum, or tap out your creation into music app importable form.
Now THIS is a cool thing - a REAL application that empowers people to do something they never could before. Albeit, if you're a tone deaf couch potato with no sense of rhythm, you will have a somewhat tougher time. But basically, this idea has actual use value compared to the previous ideas.
Cookbook
The ultimate cookbook application, with online grocery shopping, thousands of recipes, Leopard voiceover technology integration, shopping list sharing, and more.
This is a sort-of-cool idea. I don't think it has quite the scope and brilliant of Whistler, but this is something I could actually almost use... IF I were stupid enough to put a computer in the kitchen... DOH!
Portal
File syncing from the future. Sync folders and documents between Macs effortlessly and watch transfer progress through a cool, highly visual wormhole user interface.
If I needed to sync a bunch of macs together, I guess this would be useful. However, most Mac owners I know have ONE (perhaps 2) macs. Heck - I have two. But I also have three or four PCs floating around chez Spoilsport. If it could co-ordinate them too, then I'd be impressed... as it is, this comes under "A Really Good Idea" but not "Killer App".
so, I would rank them as follows:
1. Whistler - good stuff! A - A-
2. Portal - not bad - useful! B+
3. Cookbook - Pretty good, as soon as I get the olive oil cleaned out of my powerbook. B-
4. Atmosphere - stupid idea with marginal use for quadraplegics who wonder what they're missing. C
5. Blossom - an actively Bad Idea. F
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Dear God, not like that. I have a 1024x768 display and I don't want to devote all of it to a file browser. The last time I used an environment like that it was called DOSSHELL.EXE.
I just want to hit CMD+R and see a Finder window refresh. Windows has supported a "refresh" shortcut in Windows Explorer (F5) for many years. I don't expect to install a gigantic piece of $35 shareware to get such a simple feature, but that seems to be the norm on Mac OS X these days.
For more information, click here.
The total MythTV suite (back+front) or a FrontRow with PVR features. Windows MCE is just kicking Mac ass on this one. I wish Apple would hurry up... and please don't talk to me about EyeTV.
I seriously wish someone would do something like this for linux.. or offer some "idea bank."
/etc.
I know plenty of programmers who are looking for decent ideas who just , through the harshness of their day jobs, don't have much time or desire to go home and repeat the process of spec design
The winners ... will see their app idea realized as a Mac shareware application and earn royalties on sales.
The losers will see their app idea realized as a Mac shareware application, minus the whole royalty thing.
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
As it's been said, only a couple of the finalists are horribly innovative applications. Do they actually propose to try and publically shame the next guy who comes out with a cookbook app?
(Yes, for the record, I am playing around with an implementation for someline like one of the apps on the list. It's far from the same application they're proposing, but it's similar enough in overall theme that they might try to 'condemn my actions' and claim copycat. I think I've got a decent app in development, but it puts a damper on it knowing that if it gets popular enough I'm going to have these folks screaming 'he stole the idea'.)
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.
If a Finder window needs to be refreshed, it's a bug. Actually, come to think of it, that might not be true when working on a network file server, but for local files, the Finder should always be displaying current information. When working on a file server, things can change on the server that the client isn't aware of, so yeah, some sort of refresh option would be good. Can't be Cmd-R, since that's already taken ("Show Original" for aliases). I usually use Cmd-Opt-Up, Cmd-Opt-Down.
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.
Not being able to empty the trash sounds like another bug. Can you reproduce it? If so, file a bug report with Apple, with a list of steps needed to reproduce the problem.
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.
I haven't run into this problem.
I do have problems with a mounted network volume not unmounting correctly, and sometimes the icon stays in the left panel when it should disappear, or disappears when I try to unmount but the volume is really still mounted. It sounds like all these problems will get fixed in 10.5.
But gimme a goddamned refresh button before you do anything else.
A refresh button for network volumes would be good. But if you're having a problem with local files not showing up correctly, adding a refresh button isn't the right solution.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;