My Dream App

Wednesday, 23 August 2006 09:31 pm
da: A smiling human with short hair, head tilted a bit to the right. It's black and white with a neutral background. You can't tell if the white in the hair is due to lighting, or maybe it's white hair! (lego)
[personal profile] da
[edit: unlocked b/c round one is over and I didn't make it; maybe someone will take the ideas and make this anyhow?]

Yesterday I entered My Dream App, a contest to propose a new Macintosh application, judged according to its novelty, use of Mac OS features, feasibility, and marketability. Three winners will get to see their applications developed commercially, plus they get royalties. In a week, the contest closes to new submissions, and they weed the bids down to 24 semi-finalists. (Go check it out; I'd love to see what my friends come up with as their ideal applications! Plus, I'd love to bounce ideas off everyone, and help come up with something else as your bid!)

The initial bid is limited to 800 characters (eek!) and they're up to over 1,500 submissions in the first 48 hours (eek!!) So
I don't suppose I'll make it to the second round. But who knows.

People who've read my fuming about Quicken on Mac may guess where my thoughts were this week. So sue me, my dream app is... a Quicken-killer. Yah, boring. How many people would use something like this?:

Title: Tweek or Ka-ching. (Maybe something else. I've got a week to decide.) [Edit: how about 'Reggie' short for Register?.. ]

Description:


A modern money-tracking program. We've got email receipts, paypal, bank and card transaction downloads. Checkbooks are 20th century. Automate!

Default interface presents eye-candy for your chosen important items (budgets, recent transactions, balances).

Use spotlight to find emailed receipts. Attach web receipts and web proofs-of-purchase. Download .qif and OFX data. All automatically, & via task scheduler.

One goal: minimize manual entry. OCR paper receipts via scanner/iSight. Automatically reconcile where possible. Learns your behaviour well enough to make money-tracking effortless.

Another goal: use the network. Open scripting API for plugins (IO/storage/control). What if it worked with billmonk.com? What if joint expenses carried to other person's view on their mac?


---

(Please don't share this beyond my friends-list; I locked it b/c I don't want someone else to submit the same idea.)

Critiques welcome. After all, I have 12 characters to spare. ;)

Date: Thursday, 24 August 2006 03:12 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] melted-snowball.livejournal.com
I don't really understand much of money management, either.

Quicken is vaguely helpful for us because we keep quasi-separate finances (we have his, his and ours accounts), and I often pay for things that are household expenses in cash (mostly food: farmers' market visits, ethnic grocery store visits, ...) or via my own credit card.

My biggest issue with all things Quicken-like is that at the end of the day, I more or less know what I already did know, which is what my online bank balance was so kind as to tell me: I have about $X. It always feels like a huge payout for little payoff. (On the other hand, it's vaguely cool when [livejournal.com profile] da_lj tells me how much money we spend on things I didn't know we spent money on. And then I forget...)

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