Once in a while I get an idea for a project. It can be a really small micro-project (a weekend), a bigger byte-project (a month) or a very much bigger mega-project (a year). Either way I love to talk about them with my friends to get some feedback. I’m not afraid that someone will steal my idea, but I get frustrated if I find my idea on the net. So why not just write them here for all to see? If you steal it, well send me a link to it (and burn in hell ;) ). Otherwise, give me some comments on it and help me make it better!
Idea: Taxi cruise map
Do you ever get the feeling that the taxi you took didn’t go the shortest route? Sure it could be because of traffic or road work, but you still wonder if he’s taking a longer road than necessary. And why wouldn’t you? The driver gets paid by kilometer after all!
The idea would be to have an app that you start when the taxi starts, and then stop when you’ve arrived at the location. It would then plot out the route on a map, with some stats as time taken and lenght “driven”. It would also plot out the Google Map route so you can compare.
Idea: Spotify Screensaver
I run a small media computer on my TV and often have Spotify running. The problem is that the screen gets burned in if I don’t have a screensaver, but if I have a screensaver on I can’t see the name of the song playing.
So the simple idea would be a neat screensaver that shows the current playing track. A bonus would be to show the album cover and next track, and follow the beat. As it would be a third-party application the easiest way would be to parse the artist and song title from Spotify’s Window title.
By using Gracenote it could show the album cover and lyrics, but probably not feasible for a free screensaver.
The hardest part would be inventing a cool or fun enough visualization. Maybe a self playing game, like Tetris, Audiosurf, Pong or Snake? A Rubicks cube solving itself? Maybe a nice fish tank? Or random particle effects? What would you like to see as the visualization?
Idea: Shaking as pin-code
The iPhone uses a regular number PIN-code as a locking mechanism for the phone. Android uses a swipe-based method.
Wouldn’t it be funny to use shake instead? Think of your favourite chorus in a song, and shake to it. Someone would have to guess the correct song and “dig” to it as you do.
Sure everyone can see you shaking and shaking takes more effort than swiping, but it would be funny!
Idea: Abstract Amazon Web Services to a Platform as a Service (PaaS)
What I really really like about Google App Engine (GAE) is the whole Platform as a Service (Paas) approach. As a developer I really couldn’t care less about how many instances (virtual servers) are running the site or what configuration they have. I certainly don’t want to be on call 24/7, ready to manually start up new instances in case I get slashdotted. GAE just runs your application and scales when needed with your set budget as the only real limit. So upload your website project and relax.
Google provides a great dashboard that shows usage stats and costs about all metrics that count so you can optimize and lower your costs. They even offer a pretty high volume of free capacity which is great for trying out new projects/products. If it was a .NET platform I wouldn’t use anything else, but alas it’s not – it’s for Java (JVM) and Python only (although it does support anything that runs on JVM, like JRuby).
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas) so you have to manually start up new instances or set up a small network of AWS-services to do it for you. Windows Azure is even worse since there’s no infrastructure support to build the automated monitoring on.
I see it as a great business opportunity to abstract AWS into a PaaS, and provide platforms for various website technologies. Especially ASP.NET and PHP.
Let the user opt out of getting a newsletter
As a Microsoft Certified member you get a newsletter, and these are the options. Where’s the “No thanks” option?
Idea: Design pattern of the day
This is more an idea for my blog. To do a blog post about some design pattern every week. The thing is there are so many types of patterns now, everyone wants to patternize things. There’s Design Patterns in software, there’s Apprenticeship Patterns in software craftsmanship, UI Design Patterns in graphical design, there’s Pair Programming patterns, and so on. Also there’s the original architectural patterns.
What kind would be the most interesting? Maybe a mix of everything?
Idea: SVN Achievements
Some time ago my friend showed me Git Achievements. I think it’s a great idea and more and more projects are moving to GIT. Still, SVN has a large user base and it would be a great contribution to it. What I really like about achievements in general is how you can set fixed goals and have it automatically checked when someone reaches it. It’s also a visible badge that you can show off, or someone can search for (i.e. find someone with a specific achievement).
One example from the Git project is:
Caretaker Added a .gitignore file to a repository.
Some could be very introductory, such as doing an update before a commit. You could even have anti-achievements such as breaking the build. Or meta-achievements where you’re the first one to get a specific achievement on a specific project or team.
One interesting twist to this would be a community driven site for creating and sharing new SVN Achievements.
There’s a lot that can be done with this and achievements in general, I’ll probably do a post on it later.
Idea: Show postal code with geo-location
Sometimes when I’m signing a contract or paper I need to write the postal code and name. Usually it’s not a problem but a simple website that shows your position in plain text would be quite useful. Especially when used from a cell phone. Currently the address is very easy to get a hold of but the postal info isn’t.
Idea: Banking visualization purely on client-side
When I talk to people working at banks, even UI people, they love blaming their bad banking services on their legacy systems. So far I’ve been semi-succesfull in convincing people that you could do all those pretty graphs, without touching those old COBOL-mainframes.
Mint.com uses imported data.
I don’t think banks want to give you a good picture of your economy as it won’t make them more money, maybe it would make them less, and they find excuses for it. To prove a point I’d love to make a bookmarklet that uses JS to generate a page with budget data, or even import it to an online service like Swedish Spenderat.se.
