Mostly Musings about Apple and the Mac

I’ve already spoken about Phill Ryu and the remarkable success of his blog. You’d think that this would be enough for him, but this is not an 18-year-old who’s content to rest on his laurels! No sooner had he established his blog as one of the greatest runaway successes in the Mac community than he built on this with a wonderful teaser leadup to the announcement of his revolutionary idea of a competition to select My Dream App. It attracted a staggering 2700 entries, the judges somehow managed to narrow this down to 24 finalists, and now, demonstrating once again his extraordinary talent for bringing people back to his sites, these finalists are being announced three at a time over a period of a week and a half. ‘My Dream App’ is an absolutely brilliant idea! Unfortunately, it’s been compared to dreadful TV shows like Pop Idol and American Idol, but the concept is really, really good. I’m certainly looking forward to the voting stage!

So, here are the first six, presented exactly as announced at My Dream App.

First Three
1.
Herald, by Bogumil Giertler: Herald is an RSS feed aggregator that lets users package news from their favorite sites sharing a topic together as a virtual newspaper, with different sections of the newspaper representing separate RSS feeds. Herald features an iWeb style, easy to use interface for creating these newspapers, and makes it just as easy to share them and download other people’s creations. You can read the full idea here and check out Bogumil’s first blog post here.
2.
Stick-It, by Anders Melin: Stick-It is a modern update to the Stickies apps of old. Forget about their current implementation. Stick-It attempts to recreate how we really use stickies, by allowing users to stick relevant notes all over OS X, whether it is on apps, within menus, or attached on the desktop. Need to email someone? Add a sticky to Mail. Have someone you need to talk to? Place a sticky in your iChat buddy list. And Stick-It allows for much, much more. You can read the full idea here and check out Anders’ first blog post here.
3.
Desktop Wars, by Andrew Wilson: Desktop Wars brings the battlefield to your desktop, and is one of the few activities where the procrastinators win. With Desktop Wars, control armies of troops via mouse controls, voice commands, or even by shaking your motion-sensing laptop, and play several modes including capture the base and skirmish. The real fun of course begins when Desktop Wars is played on the network, and you attempt to take over your friends’ desktops. You can read the full idea here, and check out Andrew’s first blog post here.

Hmmmm. Can’t say I’d be very keen on the last of these. Of the other two, while I like the sound of both, I think Herald just shades it and gets my vote.

Second Three
4.
Cookbook, by Michael Yuan: I know what you’re thinking. A cookbook app? But Michael’s idea goes beyond that, safely into the territory of the ultimate cookbook app. Beyond the expected online recipes database integration, you have full screen remote or voice activated recipe viewing for when you’re busy in the kitchen, iPod and phone syncing for shopping lists, Leopard voiceover technology integration to have recipes read to you, and even Amazon grocery shopping integration for some quick shopping. Just check out Michael’s beautiful mockup to get a better picture of the concept. You can read the full idea here and check out Michael’s first blog post here.
5.
Chatboard, by Michael Wuerthele: Chatboard is visual group collaboration made easy. The idea keeps things simple. It’s a virtual network-enabled whiteboard that allows participants to drop in images, sketch simple diagrams, and basically add visual collaboration to chatting and other text-focused solutions with the simplicity that users would expect if Apple had done it. You can read the full idea here and check out Michael’s first blog post here.
6.
Portal, by Farzad Sadjadi: Portal merges easy to use network syncing of folders and documents between Macs with a whimsical, futuristic 3D interface. File transfers are represented by wormholes literally crackling into life on your desktop, and relevant icons are sent spiraling through the wormhole onto your Mac. You can read the full idea here, and check out Farzad’s first blog post here.

It’s more difficult to choose between these three. Despite Michael Yuan’s absolutely gorgeous mockup, I’m much more excited about the other two (and the tie-in with Amazon in Cookbook is another thing I’m not especially keen on — I mean to say, Amazon, for grocery shopping!). I love the way Portal is so up to date with its emphasis on use of Core Animation for its eye-candy, but I think Chatboard is potentially more useful, so my vote goes to that.

Update: In case it’s all a bit much in terms of taking in the details of all this, Phill also provides an excellent summary page. Also, I forgot to mention how well presented the My Dream app site is. Overall, I’d say that, in Phill, we have a definite rival for the legendary Mike Matas, the 20-year-old co-founder of Delicious Monster, famous for their flagship app, Delicious Library. Mike turned out to be so good that Apple head-hunted him. He moved there last year to work on user interfaces and icon development. I wonder if we’ll hear anything similar in the future about Phill?