Two Slashes

I remember a little more than a year ago; Digg, chatrooms, and the blogosphere in general were all abuzz with what sounded like one of the biggest undertakings ever, a cool achievement of the same caliber as Dana Hanna’s ‘An App A Day’.  The entries were in, the votes were counted, and development was starting out…

If you know what I’m talking about already (perhaps from my description, or obvious title), then kudos to you.  But for the uninitiated and clueless, I’m referring to My Dream App.  Essentially, the premise was that a group of well known (OS X) developers got together and took requests for applications common users had that they would like to see commercialized…with the expectation that the winning ideas would get a portion of the proceeds.  When everything was said and done, the apps to be developed included a cookbook/meal-planning application, a weather applet for the desktop, and (most useful) a simple way to synchronize files between multiple machines.

To go on a tangent for a moment, even though MDA was Mac-only, I still believe that the concept for MDA was excellent, and it really highlighted some of the community’s issues with Apple’s operating system (or the people using it…yeah, I’m evil).  Of course, there were the ideas that would have required a lot of development and research (research that I know for a fact is underway at several different unnamed universities simultaneously), but quite a few things that would have brought OS X more even with Windows came up just the same.

Now, fast-forward a little while to give the developers some time to get well into their projects, with the usual little bloggy updates to keep people interested in the applications informed of their progress.  The sad part is…it’ll be one year next month since the last update was posted.  And none of those apps have moved (at least, to public knowledge) from the position indicated by the latest posts for them on the development blog.  Add this to the fact that there were even brief hints at a second contest being run, and it seems as though what once was a thriving project is now collecting dust in the corner.

WWDC was earlier this week; and sure, there were a few announcements in the form of the iPhone 3G and confirmation of OS X 10.6 being named “Snow Leopard”, but it lacked any real innovation.  10.6 is a security release, the only real updates for the iPhone are upgraded connectivity and the iTunes App Store, and the quote I can’t get out of my head about how iTunes is the next ‘killer enterprise app.’  (Thanks, Justin, by the way, for making me sit through it. )  While I suppose it’s not always up to Apple to be the primary innovator, if the people commisioned to do the job can’t, it certainly seems like the entire gig has lost some of its luster.

Generally I’d let bygones be bygones and let the curtains close on something that so obviously won’t be collecting too much more attention.  But for some reason, I feel like the entire experience was just the result of me falling asleep in my swivel chair.  And now it’s time to wake up from My Dream Nap.