My Dream App

[da_lj]

[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

Comments

[dr_tectonic]

'Tweek' is a bad name. It doesn't connote finance, and is likely to be confused with either setup-tweaking or crystal meth.

I've never really understood the point of programs like Quicken. I don't have a problem keeping track of how much money I have, or where I spent it; I buy basically everything with a credit card, and I can download my transaction history at will -- ditto with checks. The credit card also buffers money, so my exact account balance at any particular moment isn't ever really important.

The thing that would be really useful would be to have all the purchases categorized, so I can see how much total I've spent on, say, groceries. And from what I can tell, that's something you have to do by hand, on top of entering all the data, and it's a gigantic amount of work, which is why I never do it.

Could this program help with that kind of thing?

[melted_snowball]

I don't really understand much of money management, either.

Quicken is vaguely helpful for us because we keep quasi-separate finances (we have his, his and ours accounts), and I often pay for things that are household expenses in cash (mostly food: farmers' market visits, ethnic grocery store visits, ...) or via my own credit card.

My biggest issue with all things Quicken-like is that at the end of the day, I more or less know what I already did know, which is what my online bank balance was so kind as to tell me: I have about $X. It always feels like a huge payout for little payoff. (On the other hand, it's vaguely cool when da_lj tells me how much money we spend on things I didn't know we spent money on. And then I forget...)

[da_lj]

Could this program help with that kind of thing?"Why yes," he said, with a twirl of his cape and a clap of his hands

[dr_tectonic]

See, I just throw the reciepts in a box and glance at the credit card bill once a month. But we're also pretty much a single-account household.

I'd never do anything with reciepts, but smart categorization would be awesome. Is that an area where you could harness the power of user contributions? Like, suppose you can export a file (suitably anonymized and sanitized) that listed a bunch of vendors that fell into some useful category, and share it with other people. Sort of like Flickr tagging. Could I have most of my vendor categorization done automatically by relying on categories that other users have published?

[da_lj]

"Why yes, it could," he said, with a flourish

[da_lj]

Intuit might be heading in this direction, with a new web-service they started, called zipingo (apparently mostly for rating and finding vendors, which shows up as ratings within Quicken. which is an odd thing to bundle into a checkbook program, but I digress.) It also seems they are going to allow users to categorize vendors on the site, so if they thought of it, they could possibly pick up categories from vendor within quicken.

http://zipingo.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/08/scattegories.html#more

I don't know how far-fetched this is, since the zipingo site seems to be down this morning. Anyway.

[da_lj]

And the name 'Tweek' is now struck from the record. ;)

I'm not sure I like 'Ka-Ching'. At least it's onomatopoeic.

How 'bout 'Reggie' short for 'Register'? :)

[dawn_guy]

Ka-Ching could work to your advantage, given what I know of Apple employees. I'd be inclined to a more "fun in function" name like BuckTrace or Bank Shot, but I'm not steeped in Apple culture.

It'd be nice to have trends (for budgeting) and exceptions (highlight unusual activity), perhaps at the expense of the "Checkbooks are 20th century" verbiage.

[da_lj]

Those are all excellent ideas.

Buck... Bucko.lico.us? (*hork*) (I need a nap).

I dunno much about apple employees, so I'm not sure what advantage I was getting from the name. I do know that the Woz is supposed to be somehow involved with grading the submissions in the contest. (eek!!!)