Remember MyDreamApp, where you could submit your application ideas and then there was a whole competition to see which ideas where the best, and would be made. Well, I’m making my own personal edition of that, where all the ideas are mine, and I’m the developer. You, dear reader, are the judge. Unfortunately, I don’t have a beautiful website like MDA, so the voting will take place in the box to the right of this text. You have until midnight on the last day of June to vote, after that I start ‘work’. You are also welcome to leave a comment with your thoughts (blogger speak for: PLEASE comment, I need your knowledge!). Here are the 12 choices, it took me awhile to come up with them, but I’m confident that I have some good stuff here. By the way: none of the names are final, they are all working titles, so don’t judge them on that basis.

TiMo: Yeah, it sort of got abandoned for a second time due to the “backend” that I wrote not being powerful enough, and once you’ve written a backend and based a whole app around it, it’s kind of too late to change. But, I am willing to re-do it one last time, this time with a much better backend that should support the whole thing.

StrobeShow: Rock out to your music by creating rhythms of light and color on the computer screen, using it like a strobe light at a rock concert. You could share your light shows with friends, even network multiple computers together so you have multiple light sources at once.

MakeItMine: Customize the icons/buttons used in your favorite apps (like going into the resource folder of apps). Simple editing built in. Theme support. A little like Candybar, but for specific apps, not the system as a whole.

CoverShow: A beautiful way to see your musical habits. Multiple, cover-flow inspired, ways to visualize your albums. Gets data from Last.fm and iTunes. Organize and play your songs however you want. Create a nice looking website to show all of your friends your music-listening habits, and your favorite songs. Network with your friends to see who has similar music tastes with you.

Desktop Tower Battle: 2 player tower defense game. Build buildings and creeps. Order creeps where to go. Place flag to be destroyed. Get money from destroying units/tower and use it to upgrade/build building/creeps. A little like the game Stratego, mixed with tower defense.

Creeps = Mobile weapons

Because the players have to keep some things secret from each-other, true ‘hotseat’ play, where they both use the same computer is not possible, there are a couple alternatives. First, complete network play, both players on different machines. This would be hard to do because of the many moving objects (creeps, bullets) that must all be the same on both computers. Another option is a ‘control panel hotseat’ system, where each player has a controller with a screen, such as a laptop or iPhone, where they control their armies of creeps. The main game showing all of the ‘action’ would run on a host computer. The problem with this is it relies on every player to have a compatible device, which might be kind of limiting, plus it might not be entirely fair if one player has a tiny little cell phone and the other has a laptop.

CodeArt: A coding based drawing and animation program. Instead of repetitive tools, use code to create fully automatable, animatable, scalable, modular graphics. A little like Quartz Composer, but more powerful, and scriptable, not just node-able. It could also use data, like RSS feeds and such, to create up to date, smart animations (again, just like Quartz).

iStudio: A video editor in between iMovie and Final cut. Specializing in subtitles, images, and keyframing position and size of multiple video tracks. It would be geared towards video podcasters, offering easy theming features, as well as quick compression and uploading features.

Bloggit: A desktop blogging client that’s actually GOOD *gasp* That’s pretty much all that needs to be said, all of the existing ones for mac suck. It would have complete mac-integration. Drag and drop media embedding. Easy templates to quickly embed YouTube videos and stuff like that, and, of course, a really good WYSIWYG editor.

REALajax: A tool to convert simple REALbasic Apps into Javascript. While Javascript does not support all of the features of REALbasic, I think it’s possible to turn a simple REALbasic app into an AJAX app automatically. It might be far fetched and hard to pull off, but with some motivation, and help, it could work. REALbasic’s easy design and coding tools make it an ideal platform not just to create desktop apps, but web apps as well, and it’s XML save format makes it easy to get the code to convert. It is also a possibility that I could make my own AJAX design and coding tool from scratch, if people are interested in that.

Jash: Flash for Javascript. Basically, a keyframe animation (and maybe interactive animation tool) that exports to Javascript and SVG.

PowerTwitter: A twitter client with a lot of useful features, like:

-Account Switching: Got multiple accounts? Choose which one to use on the fly.

-Offline Tweets: Tweet when you can’t get to twitter, they will be tweeted when twitter returns

-Flags: Like Location, Priority, Mood, and Category (Location Flag already exists, L:_____)

-Search: Take advantage of the full power of Summize in a nice interface

-Trends: Quickly See what your friends are talking about/talked about when you were gone

-TweetAhead: Integrate with tweetahead/use as a server

-Customizable Avatars: Change how your friends avatars look to you

-Customizable Sounds: Change how your friends ’sound’

-Filters: Filter tweets that you don’t want to see

-Better Growl Support: Includes Priority, separate actions per person (if wanted)

-Friend Manager: Smartly figures out who you should follow by who friends follow/@

-Stats: How much/when do you tweet

-Autotweet: Certain System actions

-Canned Responses: Including Auto-responders (@ or d)

-Bulk DM: Direct Message multiple people at a time

-TweetNumber alerts: Never miss a milestone in your tweet count

-TwitterHolic: See your twitterholic stats

-Easy Follow/Unfollow: If you forget how to ‘follow ____’

-Twitter Avatar/Style Changing: If twitter API allows

-Twintegrate: Auto tweet actions on Digg, Youtube, Wordpress, etc accounts

-Word Alerts: Alert user when certain words are mentioned (from any user, not just friends)

-Twitterfeed manager: Manage feeds that get tweeted

-Friend Location Viewer: See where your friends are

-Public Timeline: Browse the public timeline

-Highly Customizable Display Options

-Great Interface

WebCMS: A Content Management System (like Drupal or Wordpress) with no focus on blogging. It manages the pages and file structure online. When you want to edit/create a page you just type in or upload the HTML code for a page, which seems totally useless, but there are some advantages, like:

-Quick updating: if you make a mistake you don’t have to re-upload code, just hop into the editor and change it with just a couple clicks

-Version system: Make sure there are never embarrassing mistakes in your website, test out code thoroughly before publishing it, also, you don’t have to take your site down to upgrade because you can upload and test the new version of the site without affecting the old version, and then when you’re all ready, with the push of a button it changes instantly.

-User-customized pages: Send different pages to different people, based on the HTTP headers their computer sends. For example, you could automatically send an iPhone user to an iPhone specific page, or you could send a user to a version of the page translated into the language they speak. You could even give IE users and Safari users separate pages, for optimization, and making fun of the IE people. You can already do this with PHP, but the CMS would make it easier.

I could also add an online WYSIWYG editor like TinyMCE

Hey, thanks for reading to all the way down here! You’ve been great. By the way, if any other developers want to take my ideas, that’s fine with me, as long as we don’t both choose the same one, I want an iApp Monopoly :p

Also, don’t forget to vote!

This new version will take advantage of the new twitter API, as you can see TweetAhead themes itself the same way you themed your twitter page. The first screenshot is the default, the second is mine. I do plan to make this optional, incase your twitter theme is black on black on black. This also means that your account is verified when you log on, no more scheduling tweets with the wrong password!

Not only is the new front end shiny, it’s got some much requested new features: Time Zone and AM/PM are the first 2 to be implemented. These features have been in the dashboard widget for awhile, but never made it to the web interface (yet). Unlike the dashboard widget it autodetects time zone and AM/PM.

Ok, so the frontend is great and all, but will it work? The new backend will be completely redone to, hopefully, be much more reliable. It will probably feature the ability to schedule tweets more than 24 hours in advance. There will probably also be client side software that syncs TA with iCal (some people already have the beta, but the final will be improved a lot), and maybe a program that sends your tweets itself.

Currently it’s more than a mockup but less than an alpha. What you see here works, though not without countless bugs and errors. It is nowhere near feature complete, still lacking tweet listing, editing, deleting, and logs. The new backend is still in its planning phases. In other words, you’ll probably see it eventually. There might be a simple version of the frontend soon-ish, with a feature complete version and the new backend coming later. I’ll keep you posted on the status.

*Interface is not final, It will probably have changed a lot by the time you see it for real

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Searching: This is actually not a mockup, it really works, it just has some issues displaying the show data.

The effect: New touch I put on the custom list. That’s the beauty of writing your own listbox from scratch, you can do some funky stuff … of course, it comes at the price of hours of work but whatever.

Episodes Mockup: Well, it’s not a total mockup because it is ‘drawn with code’. Basically, it doesn’t do anything yet, but it is written in RB. Yes those are GarageBand Ducking arrows…

More coming soon!

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Tags: Screenshots, Talkshoe, Desktop, KeatonTech

Talkshoe_Desktop_1-20070711-173922.jpg (JPEG Image, 878×600 pixels)

I couldn’t hold it in any longer, I finalized the interface (mostly) and got the core features to work and now I have to share it with the world. Now with a much shinier interface, Search, and Live Show Joining.

As I mention in the picture, it’s not done yet. Viewing Live, Upcoming, and Featured talkcasts is done. Catagories and Search both work except for a bit of a bug that keeps the description for being displayed. The description, rating, catagory, and review all work fine on Live, Upcoming, and Featured. By tomorrow I expect to have Listening and Joining working, then after that I have to get the “Show Episodes” and “Bookmarks” working. After some pretty major bug fixes I expect to have a private beta out in a week or so. If you want to be part of this, email keatontech at gmail dot com. Also, if you have any ideas/problems with the interface let me know.

Ok, I got that out, my other 4 projects aren’t very close to being done so don’t expect to hear about them any time soon.

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Tags: Talkshoe, Notifier, Desktop, Software, KeatonTech, REALbasic, Announcement, Beta, Oh boy oh boy oh boy

You remember a few posts back I said that Talkshoe Notifier was gonna be re-branded to Talkshoe Desktop. Well, it’s gonna go throught more than just a re-branding (maybe, it depends on how many other projects I get side tracked onto). Talkshoe Notifier will be stripped of any notifier-ish functions and simply become a desktop hub for talkshoe. I hope to figure out how to add search and live streams, so you will be able to listen to live and recorded podcasts directly from the program.

But, there is still more. The purpose change calls for a complete interface re-design, and I really mean it. Have a look, and here’s another. Of course, right now that’s just a live mockup (it’s “live” because it was drawn using code, and you can scroll through the choices and they slide and fade and everything). It is taking a more frontrow style interface, which will hopefully look nicer than it currently does (Which isn’t that bad, if I don’t say so myself). Until then you can download TN and TN LITE here.

Current Status: The Main Menu and the Live Talkcasts menu are mostly functional. You can scroll, select, and go to the previous menu. Currently I am polishing the scrolling, selecting, and menu changing effects. I’m also gonna polish the interface a bit to look more like front row. The screenshots have been updated to reflect minor interface changes.

Anyway, let’s get down to buisiness. I’ve been marketing my new release of TN LITE 1.5 all over the place, and I now realise that I forgot to put it on my blog. The new version features:

• Growl Support
• Talkcasts Information (When you double click a talkcast)
• Minor UI Improvements
• Bug Fixes

Not a lot, I know, but it’s free so why not upgrade? You can download it here. If you do not know what TN LITE is I suggest you look 2 posts back.

For those of you who dont follow me on twitter, Yesterday I uploaded a brand new edition of Talkshoe Notifier to sourceforge.net. The new edition is a completely new fork of the Talkshoe Notifier project, called Talkshoe Notifier LITE (TN LITE). TN LITE is based on the same code as Talkshoe Notifier (Soon to be re-named “Talkshoe Desktop”), however TN LITE is a tiny little app that stays in the corner of your screen. Normally it appears like this:

When you press the “Show TN” button  you get this:

Whenever a new talkcast comes on the app will auto-open and say “A new talkcast has come on” in a computerised voice, much like Talkshoe Notifier. There are a couple features in TN LITE that aren’t even in Talkshoe Notifier though, 1 is this:

That is the TN LITE dock item (sorry, I have no idea how to make menu bar apps). The “5″ means that there are currently 5 talkcasts live. The other new feature in TN LITE can be seen in the screenshot of the second tab. TN LITE will actually tell you what shows came on, unlike Talkshoe Notifier. Of course, the biggest thing about TN LITE isn’t even really a feature, it is the fact that it can be so small and unobtrusive, and that it always stays on top of all your windows. I would also like to mention that when you expand or shrink the window, it does so animatedly (is that a word?), so it resizes itself over the course of 1 second. Pretty huh?

To download TN LITE go here! Have fun (or, at least as much fun as you can have with a notification app)!

Swich is still in the mockup stage, but I think i’ll at least try to program it. Video editing software of any kind is really hard to make, so no guarantee’s about when/if it will come out, in the meantime here’s a mockup image.