Macintosh (and iPhone) Application Ideas
I'm more of an idea man than a programmer. I'm none too fond of Objective-C, which is the primary programming language for Macintosh and iPhone applications. I'm looking for a Mac-savvy developer to help me turn a couple of ideas I have into real, working Macintosh and iPhone applications.
In the first month of the Apple iPhone App Store, millions of dollars in applications have been sold. If you're a Mac developer looking for a few good ideas to cash in on this hot trend, contact me. I'm looking for some specific things, so let me know the kinds of applications you have developed and why you're interested in these projects.
Idea #1: a word shuffle game
Based on the popular anagram style of game, a word is chosen from the system spelling dictionary but is presented to the player with its letters shuffled. The player must make as many words as possible from the letters given, with a minimum word length of 3. There will always be at least one word using all letters, sometimes more. Levels of play consist of different times to complete the list of words (2, 3 or 4 minutes) and selecting maximum word lengths of 5, 6 or 7 letters. The game can be made language independent by building the list of words from MacOS X's spelling dictionary in the user's own language.
Idea #2: file and folder ratings utility
My second idea builds on the idea of rating songs in iTunes but takes it to the file system level, so that any file or folder can be rated from 1-5 stars.
Why would you want to do that?
Any number of reasons. You could schedule backups of files based on importance. For instance, 5 stars is something which needs to be backed up daily, 4 stars needs to be backed up weekly, 3 stars monthly, etc. If the rating information is available to Spotlight, then you can create Smart Folders to display all files with a given rating, and combine this with Burn Folders to get ready-made lists of the files to be backed up daily, weekly, etc.
Idea #3: CD-R/DVD-R disc spanning done right
Backing up to CD-R and DVD-R made a lot more sense when hard drives were still under 40GB in size. Today most users would need dozens of DVD-R discs in order to backup their hard drive. Some utilities exist for making this relatively painless by "spanning" discs so the user doesn't need to worry about how many files can fit on one disc.
The problem I've seen with all these types of utilties is they want to lump all the files together into one huge archive file so that you must have the entire disc set, and feed it to the computer in order, in order to restore a single file. If one disc in the set goes bad, your entire backup set is useless.
Years ago when I was an OS/2 user, I wrote a utility in the REXX scripting language which would take any given directory tree, sort all the files within this tree by size and burn them to CD-R/DVD-R using the least-discs-required method. If, for instance, you had a 700MB CD-R disc, one 687MB file, a 500MB file and a 9MB file, the 687MB file and the 9MB file would go together on disc 1 and the 500MB file would go on disc 2. I called this Smart Backup for OS/2 and eComStation. I'd like to see something like this for MacOS X. SmartBackup just built lists of which files needed to go on each disc and then ran those files through mkisofs and cdrecord to actually make the discs. On MacOS X we could do the same by making Burn Folders with aliases to the files so we don't need to use double the disk space to copy the files to a second location prior to burning the disc.