3 Open Source Apps On My Wish List
by Sam Dean - Mar. 27, 2009Comments (1)- Related Blog Posts
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In February, I wrote about GizmoForYou, an interesting site that has been described as "Santa's workshop" for gadgets. Registered members create wish lists for hardware inventions, and then skilled people execute the best ideas. After thinking about the model that the site uses, I began to think that a similar model might work well for open source software development. The idea is actually not new. For example, Mozilla has routinely called for users to submit ideas for Firefox extensions, and then encouraged developers to execute the ideas. Along the same lines, in this post I've come up with three ideas for open source applications that aren't available to me now (at least I don't think they are) that I would very much like to have. I also think there could be business prospects for them.
Open source doctor apps. At the recent demonstration of the iPhone 3.0 operating system, Apple demonstrated two new applications for the iPhone that monitor the glucose levels of the owners and monitor blood pressure. The idea is that iPhone owners who have diabetes or high blood pressure could have data on their physical status collected, and even automatically sent at regular intervals to a doctor. Think of the idea as a sort of onboard doctor.
This strikes me as a great opportunity for open source developers to deliver lots of these types of monitoring applications for, say, Android. Potentially, these could eventually catch diseases earlier than any other method, and more, especially if they integrated with accessories that directly monitor the body. Smartphones already can take care of the sending part. It's the monitoring and the depth of what's monitored that need sophisticated apps.
A truly smart writerly application. I write during many of my waking hours, and am doing things to be prepared for writing when I'm not actually putting words down. It would be enormously useful to me to have a truly smart, 22nd-century software application that could sift through stories I find all the time and present me with alternative angles on them--contrarian angles, bizarre angles, provocative angles, funny angles.
Have you ever used the relatively new search engine Viewzi? It delivers standard results for search terms you enter, but you can also toggle atop its screen to photo-only views of what you want, video-only views, and many other views, where the way information is aggregated is constantly changing. For example, if you type "smartphones" in as your search term, and, on the results page at the upper right where it says "15 More," go to the Google Timeline view, you'll get a huge set of headlines placed according to when they were written. (A small portion of a large screen of these is shown at left.) You can scan all of them for idea generation. This would be how my writerly application might work, only better.
The ultimate browser. I love Firefox and all the great extensions for it, and I find it to be the most innovative browser, but there should be more innovation going on in browsers. My ultimate browser would come in a standard version designed to be rock solid in terms of not crashing, as Chrome is, but it would work with extensions and work with them well.
In a higher-end version of it, I would be able to work flexibly with the kinds of 3D graphics that Mozilla and Khronos are focusing on for the future, and it would have all the features found in a good image editor allowing me to resize, crop, and edit graphics in addition to being able to instantly send them to Flickr, an e-mail recipient, or other places. It would also do an airtight job of never letting me forget good things that I have seen online, and might come in more than two flavors, such as one iteration focused on advanced music library management and playback, and one focused narrowly on very advanced video management capabilities.
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