David Emery Online

My Dream App

4 October 2006

You may well have heard about the My Dream App contest, which is now entering it’s final stages. If not, the basic premise is that initially you could submit your idea – a couple of paragraphs is all you got – for your “dream” mac application. As the weeks have gone by, the originally chosen finalists (picked out by the team of judges) have been whittled down by a series of public votes – right now the third vote is just take place.

Before I get much further, I’d just like to highlight how well the site for this contest has been put together – the design is really nice, and the usability and layout of the voting process is really top notch. The whole thing has an attention to detail that is incredibly rare to see, online or offline.

At this stage I’m going to run through my favourite ideas, incase any of them get voted off soon.

Personally, by far the most interesting idea is Richard Whitelock’s Whistler – the concept is just genius; you just whistle a tune, or drum a beat using the microphone in your mac and it turns it into a live midi track you can use in GarageBand! The concept is brilliant, and if done well could open up music creation to a whole new audience of non-instrument playing people. Ok, maybe I’m being a tad hyperbolic, but I like a good idea when I see one – and the very worst it’s going to be fun.

And talking of fun, Desktop Wars by Andrew Wilson sounds brilliant; I work in a all-Mac workplace, and if Desktop Wars, which is a multiplayer network game that plays out on your actual desktop, gets made I can see productivity plummeting.

Out of the other entries there aren’t any other killer ideas, but some of the interface mockups are really very nice. Particular note must go to Hijack by Kevin Capizzi – the normal app interface is a beautiful combination of Mail 2.0’s unified look, coupled with some iTunes 7 influences, but the full screen mode is amazing. However, I really don’t see the utility of the app – I don’t find forums particularly hard navigate and use (unless you’re a board fanatic), and most off rss feeds these days so there’s no problem with notifications. Also, I really don’t understand the utility with the fullscreen view – why would you use it, other then for the eye candy?

The other ideas on offer are nothing too interesting; Portal looks quite interesting and useful, but the UI has some rough edges and Stick-It could be quite interesting, but I’m not sure if I’d actually use it.

What you can be sure of, though is that there is no shortage of good ideas out there – but then, it’s always the implementation that’s the hard part; I’ll be very impressed if we actually get a good bit of software out of this in a timely fashion…