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

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Or, maybe I decide the day before the contest ends that I don't want to leave it for mydreamapp.com to do badly, and go off and do it with friends anyway! ;)

I would totally use this kind of thing.

Cool.

Anyone who does budgeting and tracking of detailed expenses or is managing property or runs a small business could use this.

That's the impression I want to give in the project description- it's for all of us. There's no difference between small-business and household, as far as the programming goes. (Just category names!)

[ng-nighthawk.livejournal.com]

You know, I think this could be done online over SSL, too, just using MySQL and PHP. But then you'd actually have to build it yourself.

However, if you ever decide to pursue this on your own, I'd be interested in contributing effort toward it. I offer expertise in testing, SQL, and PHP, plus I have a low flake factor. I wouldn't say my life's dream is to come up with a secure, customizable personal finance tool, but it'd be an interesting project.

[ng-nighthawk.livejournal.com]

Oops, except for OCR on receipts. That part would require a local app. Never mind me.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

One of the fascinating things I've discovered is that mac is blurring the lines between web apps and local apps. OS X includes SOL (sqlite) and dashboard widgets are really locally executed javascripts. For example:

{
    if(window.widget)
    {
        document.getElementById("outputText").innerText = 
            (widget.system("/usr/bin/uptime", null).outputString);        
    }
}

That piece from /Developer/Examples/Dashboard/Uptime/Uptime.wdgt/Uptime.js from the Xcode download.

I've browsed Apple's beginner tutorials and if Tiger weren't going to make things so much easier to generate widgets, I think I'd be doing some widget programming in my free time right now.

[ancawonka.livejournal.com]

"I've browsed Apple's beginner tutorials and if Tiger weren't going to make things so much easier to generate widgets, I think I'd be doing some widget programming in my free time right now."

See, that's the problem I have... There are so many fun things to program, but why should I bother if someone was going to do it in a few months anyway? Other than to hang out with cool people and do it. :)

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Yes, exactly. This is one of the reasons I've got a perlmongers group to hang out with (perl folks are good for this social programming stuff). I just got myself subscribed to a Toronto based mac-programming group, so I'll see if that adds anything to the mix.

Unfortunately, there's this thing called "work" that seems to interfere with a lot of these kinds of projects. ;)