Mambo Taxi

Putting Macintoshes into Hibernation Mode solves two mysteries.

1) when a mac laptop is asleep, is it "suspend to ram" or "suspend to disk"? The answer for recent macs is "both." But you can make it suspend to disk only, which leads to:

2) can you make it stop throbbing? I think this means the answer is yes: just tell it to go to "deep sleep" and it will turn completely off once it's suspended to disk.

I'm noodling with Automator, investigating the best way to do some webby things on a mac. For a while last night I was a bit frustrated, as it looked like the only best way to do this was call out to a perl program. Which I've done before, in Linux; but I thought there might be more macish ways too. I'm also trying to convince myself that Automator isn't a gimmicky glitzy fake-programming tool.

I just wrote my first Automator script; it opens safari, logs into my credit-card account, and downloads all my activity in .qif format.

Most of this is thanks to OttoMate. It's a free set of four Automator actions: to click links or buttons, fill in form fields, check whether the page has certain contents, or call arbitrary javascript against a page.

The puzzling thing to me is that OttoMate is only billed as a Website Testing tool; it's a bit more than that. And it only has 200 google hits. It's not perfect, but it does the job, and well. Totally bizarre. I couldn't find any other macish tool that was better. Why is that?

If I can figure out how to share Automator scripts, I'll put up a tutorial somewhere. (So far, I've seen a lot of people sharing Automator scripts by doing a screen shot of their code. Screwy!)

I got this today in response to an email to the originator of the My Dream App project, who just wrote a glowing review of Cha-Ching (which looks a heck of a lot like the app I proposed). Fair 'nuff. He said they got dozens of quicken-killer apps. I guess I get a funny story out of the deal. And, of course, the app.

On Wed, 4 Oct 2006, Phillip Ryu wrote:

> I can tell you without a doubt in my mind that the Cha-Ching creators
> created the app on their own track. (I know this because the app has
> its roots in a stalled project suggested by a friend of mine a few
> months back involving the same people.) I remember one idea being
> thrown around very early on was a tagging system, which is pretty
> much the thing to do these days, as I'm sure you're aware. The name
> is an unfortunate coincidence but I'd write it off as such... it's a
> nice name, but not obscure enough to blame them for ripping it off.
> (In my mind there's a great chance they came up with it themselves
> along with you. Great minds think alike.)
>
> If you'd like to pursue this further with the Cha-Ching developers,
> that's up to you, but this is the insight I can offer into the
> situation. At the least, you definitely have solid ideas for this
> type of app, and I would think you could potentially make a great
> beta tester for the app and get some credit that way as an alternative.
>
> Glad you enjoyed the contest as a whole!
>
> -phill

[ Edit, November 2018: here's a perfect example of "put the idea out into the universe and see what happens". Here's the whole story, in reverse chronological order. ]

Holy cow. It's possible that someone thought My Dream App (Quicken, but more intuitive) was worth building.

Exhibit A:

My Dream App description: Ka-Ching. I put this up on August 27th.

Exhibit B:

Cha-Ching. The domain name was registered September 2nd.

It got announced on some entrepreneurship site yesterday. The guy says they wrote the app in three weeks. ...and I know that at least one of their devs, Jakob Wells, knew about MyDreamApp.com. Awesome.

It's going to be tough to wait until 5ish to go home. It feels a bit like Christmas!

I wonder if I get a free copy.

People on my friends' list have given me a helpful critique of my idea for My Dream App, which I'm quite grateful for, and I am looking forward to seeing how my idea does in the first round of the contest.

Something's bugging me, and it partly goes to the core of my belief in open-source development as a workable system.

This contest, of course, isn't open-source; it's an idea competition to generate shareware. Winning ideas get prizes, and the winning three ideas get 15% of whatever proceeds get made. I've said the biggest prize for me would be the development of this application. Because I really need something like it.

But. My ego's involved. I want my version of it to be made. Of course, right? But how much do I want my version instead of a version?

Open-source reasoning goes that good ideas will bubble to the top, and interested people who can implement them, will do so. Everyone wins. At the same time, there's a letting-go involved; accepting that your idea may be shot down by the project manager; or people will laugh at your code; or other semi-rational things. I've contributed code to various projects, but I sit on a lot more code, for all of those reasons. I also sit on ideas I think are viable, just because I don't want to lose the control.

The contest site is set up with a forum so people can share their ideas and drum up support in advance of voting. And a fair number of people have; it looks like 355 out of 2000 ideas submitted. A few of them look somewhat similar to mine, though I think mine still has lots they haven't talked about publicly.

Of course other people will take ideas from the public posts, for their own app. So I wonder whether I should go public with the good parts of my idea. If my ideas are as good as I hope they are, they will be spread into everyone else's apps, guaranteeing a spot in the second round (when the field is narrowed from 2000 apps to 24, when everyone who's submitted an app can vote). And maybe the added ideas will improve the chances for lasting the 3rd through 5th rounds.

But only three apps will ultimately be made in this contest. The others will revert to the author. I think parts of my idea could be commercially viable. But what are the chances I'd end up using them anyway?

Aren't I better off trying to make a version of the idea get completed?

P'shaw. Ego makes things complicated.

[edit: and indeed, isn't this a bit navel-gaze-y and don't I have better things to do? Oh wait, yes I do. Hm.]