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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. "
Sheesh, you call those choices? Give the people what they really want!
The revolution will NOT be televised.
exchange a trillion dollar software idea for a legal copy of those other trillion dollar apps? Do I at least get a bumper sticker?
Im willing to offer up licensed copies of Linux. IF you can provide me with the next killer app.
A shareware nag-screen remover?
your link gives 404 =(
try
http://iscrybe.com/
nice app indeed
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
"will see their app idea realized as a Mac shareware application and earn royalties on sales."
I didn't even have to RTFA to spot that.
They're getting more than a free T-Shirt, they're getting published. This is basically just making executive decisions through publicized contests instead of closed-door boardroom sessions.
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.
It's a joke, he was joking. Woz has always been a sarcastic joker.
BTW, he didn't "invent" the Mac.
"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?
No doubt Apple's new cell phone offering will include vibrate mode.
Where were you when the voynix came?
"its Indian spam"
The curry-sauce makes it a lot easier to choke down.
Where were you when the voynix came?
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.
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
I think you're confusing shareware with freeware.
Shareware means there is a demo version that you're encouraged to share, but there is also a full version that you have to pay for.
Freeware is just that: free (as in beer).
You mean like this?
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.
Nah, that's pretty weak. Read John Dvorak's columns to learn to troll Mac users successfully.
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
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.
Your links did not work. Can you post them again?
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.
Yeah, man. And I am stuck on linux because I really need to run Word and there is no WINE for windows yet. Dang it!
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.
[
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'.)
For OSS Mac stuff, a good guide is OpenSourceMac.
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
I have never in my life used an illicit substance. I have made up jokes on many occasions and not turn out good.
OK a new size TV
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.
Just my luck. The one time I falsely accuse a towering figure of 20th century technology of using drugs, he's actually reading my comments.
Sigh.
Is there nowhere that I can turn where I can safely slander people?