My Dream App

Aug 23, 2006 21:31

[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 ( Read more... )

geek, mac, mydreamapp

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Comments 37

dr_tectonic August 24 2006, 02:11:00 UTC
'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?

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melted_snowball August 24 2006, 03:12:05 UTC
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...)

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da_lj August 24 2006, 03:56:02 UTC
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 ( ... )

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dr_tectonic August 24 2006, 05:29:27 UTC
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?

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dcseain August 24 2006, 02:53:38 UTC
I agree with dr_tectonic that Tweek is not a good name. Especially since what you're describing is more of a money genie.

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da_lj August 24 2006, 04:02:40 UTC
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'? :)

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dcseain August 24 2006, 04:06:28 UTC
Cute, Mac-like, and i ilke it. But will it really mean anything to people 10 or more years younger than we are, that is if were marketed that Reggie is short for Register?

Maybe it can be in the release notes, complete with graphics of old-school, filled-out registers. I could probably dig some up for that from my dirt-poor college days.

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ng_nighthawk August 24 2006, 03:49:34 UTC
I would use this because we manage several different accounts which must be merged. One thing to mention (it might make the folks less likely to pick your choice, not sure on the politics of such things) is that we are a Mac/PC household. Interoperability with other programs, or publishing to an editable generic format (.pdf and .html are not terribly editable, if you see what I mean) would be nice. But as I say, I sense there might be some annoyance with that kind of thing.

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da_lj August 24 2006, 10:28:02 UTC
Yes! Check out billmonk: they store your db of owed stuff (money, books, anything you want) and they send you emails based on changes. This program can parse the emails and submit new transactions via new emails to their system. (I believe they have blogged they want to add an API for doing this directly via the web, once they get a bit bigger). I would love to see this program transact via trusted email addresses. So, for non-mac users, they could get emailed transactions directly, or via billmonk (who will track the totals for you).

I had a 4am thought: this program itself could handle non-money items just as well. Make it transparently easy to add new "denominations" and shazam, if your "friends" category includes a transaction with the denomination "beer"... you can mark that you owe Dave a beer.

[The problem with email transactions is authentication; I expect billmonk will run into this as well, people forging the "from" and inserting bad URLs. This program can possibly get around that with SPF to validate the domain, in ( ... )

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ancawonka August 24 2006, 05:45:44 UTC
This is the kind of idea, where, if they don't accept it into the program, you can get together with three friends, built it over a couple of weeks, and either open source it or sell it to some company (apple, quicken, google, etc)...

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

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da_lj August 24 2006, 10:39:38 UTC
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!)

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ng_nighthawk August 24 2006, 14:52:58 UTC
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.

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ng_nighthawk August 24 2006, 14:54:25 UTC
Oops, except for OCR on receipts. That part would require a local app. Never mind me.

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earthling177 August 24 2006, 08:08:02 UTC
I think that of the names mentioned, "Ka-Ching" is definitely the most attractive. If you have to explain why it's named Tweek or Reggie, some part of the population won't even look at it twice on the shelf -- with Ka-Ching you at least get a second look, even people who don't ordinarily use apps like that will at least want to know what it is and will have basically no problem remembering the name to tell their friends who are looking for one ( ... )

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da_lj August 24 2006, 10:47:59 UTC
Yeah. The OCR might be tough to do properly, especially if it's via low-res like the iSight. It's definitely the toughest part (other than generically deciding which extra features go into the first release, and which should be plugins.) OCR might rely on a dedicated scanner, for the first version (though that sucks too. Open scanner. lay down receipt. close scanner. press button. Lather/rinse/repeat.)

I like Delicious Library a lot, I downloaded it just to play with the iSight scanner thingy. I decided my time was better spent on other things than making a (very pretty) db of all our books. But yeah, it was one of my inspirations when I was thinking about this.

It would totally kick ass if machine-readable receipts were bar-coded so we didn't have to muck around with OCR.

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earthling177 August 24 2006, 20:51:01 UTC
OCR might rely on a dedicated scanner, for the first version (though that sucks too. Open scanner. lay down receipt. close scanner. press button. Lather/rinse/repeat.)Well, yes and no. I guess the part that sucks with the scanner is the overhead (it will take about the same time per linear inch of the flatbed whether you have one or 4 receipts). That part can be solved by allowing multiple receipts to be scanned at once, at least one app (CanonScan) does that already for the picture part, I have not tested the OCR part, but I'm almost sure that the OCR part just takes documents, so the scan part can just break say, 6 receipts into 6 docs and feed them consecutively to the OCR ( ... )

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da_lj August 24 2006, 22:19:12 UTC
Getting off the topic a bit... but: have you seen the newer wand scanners? I heard of one a few months ago, but I don't think I wrote down the brand name. That would be wonderful if they worked well..

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