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. "

Comments

Re:Nice thinking

[admactanium]

Sounds like a great way to get some free ideas for applications. A lot of companies have been doing this lately. Nothing like giving away your intellectual property for free!

except that you get a share of the revenues from shareware licenses. obviously on slashdot the idea seems completely daft since there's such a high percentage of coders here. but most people can't code an application. so if you can give up your idea (which costs you nothing in the form of labor or materials) and realize a possible profit from someone else's programming labor, then where's the bad deal? it's certainly easier than researching and hiring a programmer when you have no expertise in the field at all while taking a financial risk in the form of payment for that programmer. maybe you should look at it from the perspective of the people for whom the contest was designed. no decent programmer in their right might would submit an application to this process because they could do it themselves.

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.

My take on the choices...

[Ralph Spoilsport]

Atmosphere
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

Re:Woz is out there, man!

[Speare]

It's kinda sad, actually.

Two months before I heard of this, I thought it would be cute to make an iBonsai program. Screensaver-simple, as one of these judges said. A bonsai tree with a variable time scale, from 1x to 20x. Lets you snip twigs or pinch buds to control the overall growth direction, replace the pot when it get large enough, watch it grow under different seasons, and that's about it. There are dozens of tree varieties that work well in bonsai, but it's a bit fussier than practical for those of us who don't have a green thumb or the proper humid environment.

Killer app, NO WAY. $5 shareware cute product, for some people, yes. Less manic than a Tamagotchi, but the same basic idea.

Condemn copycats?

[Rob_Warwick]

This paragraph out of their FAQ annoys me:

Okay, maybe you guys aren't going to steal my idea, but what about other people? If I'm a finalist and my idea is online for everyone to see, couldn't anybody potentially steal it?

Technically, yes. Unscrupulous developers could do just that. But if it comes to our attention that someone is pilfering ideas from our contestants, then we will do everything in our power to publicize and condemn their actions. And if any copycat apps do surface on the open market, we have faith that the Mac community will do the right thing and not subsidize plagiarism.

Ultimately, we cannot offer any guarantees about the security of your ideas, but it's a chance that we are willing to take. Remember, we have just as much to lose as you do.

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'.)