Here's an idea: let people suggest ideas for an application they'd like to see, and then get people to vote on it, and then get a team of dedicated developers to, uh, develop it. That's the plan behind MyDreamApp; in the past few weeks, it notes, "the My Dream App development team has whittled down over 2700 submissions to just 24 finalists, and starting today, it's up to you to decide which ideas stay, and which ideas go." Three will win.
A sidenote: the developers doing this are Mac-only, so it's one of those marginal things, but it could flow through to the Windows side of the world.
The people who suggested the winning programs will get royalties for life (though what happens if the program gets bought? Anyone asked that yet?).
The programs seem to split into three: user interface; get things done; build the impossible app. In the first category, for example, is iSightsee, which would let you control your machine via hand gestures through your webcam. Sounds very Minority Report-ish, but the professional programmers who are weighing these up shoot it down. In the second category are things like iGTD (I Get Things Done), Stick-IT (a "modernised Stickie solution"), or Cookbook for organising your recipes. And for the last, Minerva, a "virtual secretary for your Mac". Great concept, but impossible to make work across different applications preferences - as one of the pros points out, you can't even get people to agree on an email program, how will they agree on a virtual secretary which uses a particular set of programs?
Even so, pitch in and vote. Might as well keep them out of any other mischief. But my own reaction, after looking at the ideas and the putdowns for the ones that seemed promising, was that I wanted to see RON - Re-Open Nominations.
