Cool software I will never write

Mobile Apps (link)

2010-06-17T10:48:00.000+01:00

My colleague Dave wrote a post about mobile apps on his blog that fits perfectly. And he's right, those apps would make a lot of sense.

"Demotion" Plugin for iTunes

2010-06-14T13:11:00.001+01:00

Even though my willingness to listen to a specific piece of music on my iPod depends heavily on my mood and I would ideally want to iPod to know that and stuff, I think that is a pipe dream and I need something else mid term.

So what about using the good old "4-5 stars" playlist and helping it a little?

There is songs that I skip a lot. They are on the list but somehow I mostly don't want to listen to them just now. On the other hand, they are good enough and I do not manually change them to 3 stars.

So what I need is a plugin that checks play count, skip count, last played date and last skipped date and demotes stuff that I have skipped too often or consistently.

The icing on the cake would be if it remembered and later promoted those back up when I have forgotten about them.

A Cards & Banking API

2009-08-25T13:37:00.000+01:00

Now this one doesn't really fall into the category "I will never write", but it sure would be nice to have: an API for banking and credit cards.

What would I do with it?

First of all I would write my own interface to consolidate all money in one view.
I would create a tool that automatically pays credit cards just before any interest is due, making them safe to use.
I would write a tool that handles regular payments like rent, TV license, council tax, ...
The tool would automatically move all available money to the account that currently promises the highest interest rate, of course.

Would be nice, wouldn't it?

"Semi-Shuffle" for iTunes and iPod

2009-07-27T16:43:00.000+01:00

I would love to have a plugin for iTunes that allowed me to create "suggestions", "connections" or "musical journeys".

Would work like this: after song A, I would normally (or often) like to listen to song C and sometimes to song F. So in iTunes, I drag a line from A to C and another one from A to F and I tell iTunes to use these when shuffling, one or the other.

Thing is: I think stars and playlists are fine but they do not come close to capturing the way I listen to music. There is no "mood" in there. No concept of memories attached to songs and the string of memories in my head. So we need more!

This being 2009, I would probably also want a way of importing those "connections" or "musical journeys" via social networks like last.fm, facebook or whatever else I am using.

A Screenshot Plugin for my Parents

2008-09-29T10:59:00.000+01:00

Standard situation: My wife is on skype with her parents. Something on the other end doesn't work. They discuss for 20 minutes before my wife even knows what the issue is.

What we need is a plugin for pidgin, skype, adium and others that allows someone to take a screenshot with one button. A preview would then pop up and the user could touch (or click on) the region where the issue is. The screenshot would then be sent through and displayed on the other end.

My stepmother would push the button, click on the area of the screenshot and my wife would then see the screenshot with an enlarged set-in.

Alternatively, my wife could hit a button and the screenshot would be requested on my stepmother's machine.

Would be a life saver. Or at least a good time saver.

A Betting System for Drivers

2008-04-23T13:17:00.004+01:00

Occured to me this morning in cab while cabbie and I discussed which way to take:

There's always more than one way to go to Rome. There's also almost always a debate about which one's fastest.

So why not put our money where our mouth is and bet on it?

It would work like this:

1. I decide to take route a over route b.
2. I tell my onboard computer that I bet 5 pounds that route a is faster.
3. onboard computer tries to find cars in my vicinity that go to same place (or roughly same place)
4. onboard computer sees if any of those use different route
5. onboard computer sees if any of those are betting
6. both onboard computers transfer bets to central server
7. cars go to destination
8. at destination, first to arrive wins money

Now obviously there's some hardware needed in the cars, but I'm pretty sure that'll be around fairly soon. GPS is fairly widespread already, so all we need is inter-vehicle communications. Let's wait a year or so and see...

Or is this a stupid idea?

A Feed Reader Plugin for Pidgin

2008-03-26T12:19:00.004Z

Pidgin is my favourite instant messaging client. I have been using it when it was still called gaim, mostly for Yahoo and XMPP messaging (like Twitter).

I recently discovered the Skype API Plugin which makes pidgin even more useful as we use skype chat a lot at my current work.

Now the only thing missing is a feed reader!

I am using SharpReader for my daily RSS fix, but having two different UIs pop up every now and again is beginning to be too disruptive.

Wouldn't it be great if my feed updates could be displayed in a pidgin chat window?

And no, I do not want to switch to Miranda. I am used to pidgin, and I am too old to change habits :-)

An Operating System that understands one thing: I do not want it to ever delete my data!

2008-03-23T20:32:00.003Z

When it comes to the data on my machine, there is one rule that I follow: Never delete content that I have created myself!

I am trying to follow that rule by putting files that I made into a separate folder structure, onto a separate hard drive, or by copying it to gmail.

The latter sounds a bit silly, but to be honest: they all are! Why would I have to worry about not deleting content I created when there is one entity that knows for sure and should be able to take care of this on its own: the operating system.

After all, I am typing this text and the OS does know that. So why doesn't Windows go "uh, he's typing something. I'll see where he puts that and make sure it'll never get deleted. He'll like that."?

Now, will I ever write an OS? Probably not. All I can do is ask Paul or Steve to include this as a feature. Or I could get involved with Linux and develop something myself, maybe as part of gnome... I have to think about this...

A "mix tape" site for MP3 play lists

2008-02-18T22:32:00.002Z

So you have 5000+ songs on your iPod. But which one do you want to listen to next?

Remember the days when we would make tapes?

In those days, everybody had at least one friend who made really good tapes. For me, it was my friend Arne. Somehow, he knew the good music. And somehow, he knew what I wanted to listen to. I still have a couple of his tapes. Never mind that I don't actually own a cassette player anymore.

I would bet that he has more than one play list these days. While I usually listen to my music using "Shuffle Songs", he is probably creating play lists for different occasions or moods. For different genres or artists. For different times of the day or seasons of the year. And most likely for different people.

So where is the site that brings his play lists to me?

The way I see it, a plugin would scan my music library, then go out and search for play lists that match my songs. I would select some of them, probably based on their name and a short description provided by the creator. I would have my favourite creators in a short list, and I would probably automatically download new lists they made.

(Marketers: the site would of course have a "buy missing tracks" button)

What's in it for play list makers? Well, they would really be DJs. Create good lists, and you'll create yourself some fans...

Somehow I think there must be something like this out there already. No?

A "Social Meta Network" Site

2008-01-25T13:07:00.000Z

Data portability is a good thing, I guess, but it does not immediately solve my issue: I'm sick of entering and maintaining my personal data on about a dozen sites.

The solution: A site that reads my information from any one site (or from my openid) and maintains it on all the others. That way I would only need to maintain one profile, say the one on Linkedin, and the software would update all the others. Or, I could edit my profile on my meta site directly.

My meta site would also show me news and information about all the contacts I have across all social networks (a bit like spokeo.com), and it has to be able to understand that some people have multiple accounts (e.g. via a merge feature like the one in pidgin).

Wouldn't that be a pip?

A "CSS Consolidator" or Tree-based CSS Editor

2008-01-17T14:11:00.000Z

I was trying some new layout on a couple of my web pages the other day.

Whenever I do that I always end up with a bunch of different CSS files all over the place, and it becomes increasingly different over time to keep them clean.

Being a programmer, I'd like to follow the DRY directive: don't repeat yourself. In order to do so, my CSS files would ideally be organised in a hierarchy: some CSS directives apply to all my pages, so they should end up in global.css, while others apply only to the astronomy section of my pages and should therefore be in astro.css.

Also, I like to seperate CSS files according to function (layout.css vs. typo.css).

In the end, I always have enough of those files to lose overview.

What I would need is a tool that displays all of my CSS directives along with where they come from. That way, I could move them easily from one file to another, or up/down the hierarchy if needed.

The tool must have an automatic consolidation feature that would move directives up the tree as far as possible.

I would not want to be able to graphically browse through my (X)HTML and apply CSS rules using the mouse. I would really want this tool to be able to work on existing or create a hierarchy of CSS files.

Does that make sense?

A Digital Rights Management (DRM) Infrastructure for my Personal Data

2007-12-30T08:39:00.000Z

The UK has seen a couple of odd cases of "data loss" lately. Government organisations have on at least 4 occasions lost data about UK citizens: names, birth dates, addresses, bank account details and even some hospital records. Some data was lost by subcontractors and one of those subcontractors was even in the US!

Things like this have not happened in other countries, yet, or maybe they were not made public. But they make me wonder: can I trust my country or my government know what they do with the data they collect from me?

As Jan Schallaböck of the German ULD suggested in a talk at 23C3: DRM might be the solution.

If whenever I hand personal data over to anybody, I could at the same time specify who should be able to use that data, and for how long, I would not be affected by data losses at all.

Of course, it is not that simple.

For this to work, there has to be some standard for "DRM-protected personal data". The different government branches who need my data would have to use software that can handle this standard format-to-be. And I would need some software on my end that would enable me to apply DRM to my data before I send it off.

Maybe it's another "egg or hen" situation as no government will buy software as long as nobody sends them DRM-protected data. And as long as they cannot read it, I am forced to send my data in plain format.

I would love to have a tool that enables me to send my data off with DRM enabled. I guess I would need to parts: one tool that does the "signing" of my content, and a second one that acts as a server and "watches" how my data is used, or enables some people or organisms to actually use the data. The latter one would also render the data unreadable whenever I want.

Of all the software I won't write, this is by far the most important. If anyone knows of a project - preferrably open source - then let me know! I'd absolutely participate.

A "Social Search Engine"

2007-12-11T08:20:00.000Z

A social search engine would work like this: enter the name of someone you know and press enter. The engine then goes through all the hip web 2.0 social networks and looks for a person with that name. In the end, you will get a list of blogs, accounts on Facebook, MySpace and the like, twitter feeds, and so on.

Why would I want that?

I am sure a lot of my friends are using social sites in ways that I don't know about. And I would potentially like to know what they are up to.

So whenever I find someone on Linkedin, I would also use the social search engine to see whether she is active in any other place as well.

Of course, the next step would be a tool that searches all my address books every now and again in order to find friends automatically.

Update: Just found something on Guy Kawasaki's twitter feed: Spokeo seems to do some of the above...

Update: data portability is now the next big buzzword, and all the big social sites have jumped on the bandwaggon. We'll see how far it all goes... check dataportability.org for more information.

Foto Timer or Meditation Timer for Windows Mobile

2007-12-05T09:35:00.000Z

I really should port Foto Timer or Meditation Timer to Windows Mobile (or Pocket PC, or whatever the name is, currently) for two reasons: first of all, Palm OS seems to be "on the way out". Secondly, lot's of smartphones use Windows Mobile.

I simply do not have the time to rewrite Foto Timer and Meditation Timer, currently. And I only have an old Compaq iPac to test it on, not the most sexy device ever...

On the other hand, of all the software I will never write, this is the most probably to materialize some day :-)

A Joomla to Drupal converter

2007-11-29T14:25:00.000Z

I will absolutely never write a converter that takes content from a Joomla-driven site and tries to recreate the same site in Drupal.

First of all, the concepts of the two are far enough apart to make that very difficult to do automatically. A user would have to define quite a lot of things in the process, such as matches from categories to taxonomy, possibly for each node individually. That GUI would not be very easy to understand.

Also, there is no way I could ever build a tool that converts Joomla themes to Drupal themes. The process would therefore be semi-automatic, at best.

Joomla has modules and components, which extend the functionality. Drupal also has modules, but of course they are different. A converter would only make sense if it could handle at least the most common Joomla modules and components. A shop based on Virtuemart, for example, would have to be converted to a similar Drupal module. That's a bit like "yet another converter".

A Joomla to Drupal converter would be a good thing to have, and I could surely use one right now, but I think re-creating the site manually will be faster and lead to better results.

A backup tool that is completely independent of any hardware

2007-11-20T12:42:00.001Z

My friend Arnd and I were thinking about this some time ago:

Backup solutions have one bottleneck - the hardware. CDs rot, tapes lose information eventually, the neccessary readers are difficult to come by. So the ideal backup solution would be completely hardware independent.

There is such a thing: the Internet.

Here's how it would work: my data would be split into pieces. Those pieces would then be transfered to the machines of some of my friends. I would keep a .torrent file (for example in an email saved on GMail). With that torrent file I could download all of my data using a standard BitTorrent client.

For added security, I would advise the tool to store some of my data more than once.

Now what if one of my friends buys a new machine or loses his disk? Well, as soon as his new machine would be back online, the data would be retransfered to his disk automatically. And if he chooses not to join the group again, my data would be stored somewhere else.

I would obviously donate a chunk of my disk to other people in my group.

There are some solutions out there that work like this, but not free, and not using BitTorrent for the restore process.

An "Immersive Development" IDE

2007-11-20T12:40:00.000Z

I will never write an "Immersive Development" IDE (see http://immersive-development.blogspot.com/) because I do not have the resources to do so.

Cool software I will never write

2007-11-20T12:36:00.001Z

Hi All!

Welcome to cool software I will never write.

This blog contains a list of software (apps and tools) that I would like to use but will realistically never write. Don't ask me why I would need such a list, I just do.

Have fun,
Jan