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

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

See, I just throw the reciepts in a box and glance at the credit card bill once a month. But we're also pretty much a single-account household.

I'd never do anything with reciepts, but smart categorization would be awesome. Is that an area where you could harness the power of user contributions? Like, suppose you can export a file (suitably anonymized and sanitized) that listed a bunch of vendors that fell into some useful category, and share it with other people. Sort of like Flickr tagging. Could I have most of my vendor categorization done automatically by relying on categories that other users have published?

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

"Why yes, it could," he said, with a flourish.

But I was thinking about that before, and people are more funny about money than they are about shared photos or bookmarks. All you have to say is "phones home" and you lose a chunk of interested users.

Even as little shared information as, "anonymous user X shops at store Y and calls that category Z." If the data were stockpiled by some random company, I wouldn't necessarily trust that they weren't collecting my shopping patterns, even without pricetags.

Though, there could be a pre-seeded list of stores, and there could be separate options for automatically doing a lookup, and automatiacally submitting new store/categories. (filter out categories marked private?)

Glad you mentioned Flickr tagging. This gets into something else I didn't have space to write in the short form. Tags: why limit to one category like Quicken does? Categories shouldn't be mutually exclusive; a shipping purchase can be personal, joint, business; it could be for a particular project I wanted to track; or all of the above.

Quicken's model is convoluted: there's a "category" (limited to one, though they can be hierarchical and therefore inherited). You can have a "class" which is sort of a second independent category, but not really. Limited to one.

And you can have a "transfer" which means one side is a credit and the other side is a debit. But a transfer can't be categorized, which means you need to mess around with double-entry accounting and set up the other account to be normalized to zero if you want to categorize those transactions. And then, they turn out to be negative. I've tried going the double-entry route for categorizing joint expenses, and damn but it's complicated and annoying.

Hm, I hadn't realized I would vent so much about Quicken categories. Guess you hit a nerve. ;) I don't know any program that does this right, either.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Intuit might be heading in this direction, with a new web-service they started, called zipingo (apparently mostly for rating and finding vendors, which shows up as ratings within Quicken. which is an odd thing to bundle into a checkbook program, but I digress.) It also seems they are going to allow users to categorize vendors on the site, so if they thought of it, they could possibly pick up categories from vendor within quicken.

http://zipingo.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/08/scattegories.html#more

I don't know how far-fetched this is, since the zipingo site seems to be down this morning. Anyway.