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?

---

(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

[earthling177.livejournal.com]

I think that of the names mentioned, "Ka-Ching" is definitely the most attractive. If you have to explain why it's named Tweek or Reggie, some part of the population won't even look at it twice on the shelf -- with Ka-Ching you at least get a second look, even people who don't ordinarily use apps like that will at least want to know what it is and will have basically no problem remembering the name to tell their friends who are looking for one.

The OCR is very interesting. Why enter stuff by hand when the computer can do it for you, even if you have to then correct a few characters? And your description of Quicken makes me happy I've never used it -- it is just asinine to make users enter all their transactions before you import the .qif, WTF?, it should prove much easier to download the file and let people point and click to transactions and maybe even drag and drop them in the right places when they find the paper receipts than entering stuff by hand.

I have not looked at Delicious Library in a while, but the guys there used to describe in general terms what they did to read the UPC thru iSight so they can enter the book in the library. I have the app, I like it even though I have not really used it a lot, but I ended up buying a dedicated, hand-held UPC laser scanner that uses Bluetooth because holding books to the iSight gets old fast. On the other hand, books are heavy, receipts are not.

Either way, I love your idea, and I figure once it's out, one mention on the Mac sites should get you plenty of customers, particularly if you use a portable file that can easily be converted to/from Quicken, like ng_nighthawk's example.

Good Luck!

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Yeah. The OCR might be tough to do properly, especially if it's via low-res like the iSight. It's definitely the toughest part (other than generically deciding which extra features go into the first release, and which should be plugins.) OCR might rely on a dedicated scanner, for the first version (though that sucks too. Open scanner. lay down receipt. close scanner. press button. Lather/rinse/repeat.)

I like Delicious Library a lot, I downloaded it just to play with the iSight scanner thingy. I decided my time was better spent on other things than making a (very pretty) db of all our books. But yeah, it was one of my inspirations when I was thinking about this.

It would totally kick ass if machine-readable receipts were bar-coded so we didn't have to muck around with OCR.

[earthling177.livejournal.com]

OCR might rely on a dedicated scanner, for the first version (though that sucks too. Open scanner. lay down receipt. close scanner. press button. Lather/rinse/repeat.)

Well, yes and no. I guess the part that sucks with the scanner is the overhead (it will take about the same time per linear inch of the flatbed whether you have one or 4 receipts). That part can be solved by allowing multiple receipts to be scanned at once, at least one app (CanonScan) does that already for the picture part, I have not tested the OCR part, but I'm almost sure that the OCR part just takes documents, so the scan part can just break say, 6 receipts into 6 docs and feed them consecutively to the OCR.

Actually, not only that makes scanners more useful than they used to be, if you can now do finances too, but maybe one or more of the scanner manufacturers might be interested in bundling your app with their scanner -- at this point, they are all basically a commodity, selling from 50-150 bucks and desperately in need of anything to make them look different and better -- Canon scanners, for example, advertise they can be used vertically, LOL... while it's true and nice that they are thin enough to be put away between two external hard drives until you need to scan something, thus saving table space, it's very hard to use it on its side, not to mention it makes it impossible to scan stuff that is more than a few pages thick, like books.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Getting off the topic a bit... but: have you seen the newer wand scanners? I heard of one a few months ago, but I don't think I wrote down the brand name. That would be wonderful if they worked well..

[earthling177.livejournal.com]

I remember seeing one model, in passing, at my local CompUSA -- I didn't even stop or see what brand it was either, my first thought was "oh, they're trying that one again". I sure hope they work well, or at least better than the previous couple of tries since 1986. The reputation is that it takes a very steady pace to get good results. Granted, now we have enough computing power to embed in them that they might actually be working well. Then again, if you skew the scanner just a bit, the distortion is hard to correct. I guess they are a little desperate, unless one is in a very specialized application, like libraries or journalism, scanners don't have as high an appeal as they once had, now that photography is digital.

PS: Google seems to point to a lot of different brands, like Wizcom InfoScan, IRISPen and Planon System Solutions DocuPen. They all seem like OCR pens, no pictures (not that I expected pictures).

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

hm. here's a mystery: the one I heard of was operated differently than those three: you waved the long side of the wand against the page. I'll see if I can figure out what it was.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

I agree about the name, too. ;)

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

On the opportunity for customers:

I'm quite amused to discover just now that Intuit has a blog for Quicken. The most recent entry was Oct. 13, 2005, an announcement of an update to Quicken 2006.

http://quicken.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/10/new_quicken_200.html#comments

It was taken over by mac users complaining politely about how badly they're being treated.