My Dream App

[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?

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(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. ;)

Comments

[ng-nighthawk.livejournal.com]

I would use this because we manage several different accounts which must be merged. One thing to mention (it might make the folks less likely to pick your choice, not sure on the politics of such things) is that we are a Mac/PC household. Interoperability with other programs, or publishing to an editable generic format (.pdf and .html are not terribly editable, if you see what I mean) would be nice. But as I say, I sense there might be some annoyance with that kind of thing.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Yes! Check out billmonk: they store your db of owed stuff (money, books, anything you want) and they send you emails based on changes. This program can parse the emails and submit new transactions via new emails to their system. (I believe they have blogged they want to add an API for doing this directly via the web, once they get a bit bigger). I would love to see this program transact via trusted email addresses. So, for non-mac users, they could get emailed transactions directly, or via billmonk (who will track the totals for you).

I had a 4am thought: this program itself could handle non-money items just as well. Make it transparently easy to add new "denominations" and shazam, if your "friends" category includes a transaction with the denomination "beer"... you can mark that you owe Dave a beer.

[The problem with email transactions is authentication; I expect billmonk will run into this as well, people forging the "from" and inserting bad URLs. This program can possibly get around that with SPF to validate the domain, in case your spam-filters don't do so automatically.]

[you probably don't care about that, but I wanted to write it down to be sure I remember myself. ;) ]