This reminds of this: http://www.squidi.net/three/ which attempts to define a large number of computer game gameplay mechanics.
Maybe we need more forwarding-reaching fiction in our world. More essays on computing futurology, grand envisioning of what we can achieve with software. Even ambitious prototypes of a new way to do something (like Lighttable)
A lot of what I see are tooling details, lot of boring effort duplication on mostly-identical languages and lot of nitpicking/bikeshedding comments like: well, you may have a good idea for solving world cancer, but your article does not work in my weird mobile browser, so your credibility is shot.
Where's our version of "The Mother of all Demos" ?
The problem is most modern computing is driven by the single question: "How can I monetize this idea?" It's only hobbyists and academics that really try to improve the state of computing, rather than having a primary focus on revenue. It's unfortunate that groundbreaking ideas are usually not the moneymakers, else we'd see innovation at a quicker rate.
Software patents are another hindrance to innovation too. Often the results of some publicly funded research are patented, and never actually made into end products, and the public has no rights to use the invention funded with their tax money. I'd bet a dozen or more of those hundred ideas are already covered in part by some patents that aren't used in any real products, but serve only to prevent anyone else from developing them.
I can't really see most people being so open about ideas as the author of this article precisely because innovative ideas people have will also come with the idea of monetizing it, with the belief that they need a patent to do so.
What's more of a shame, is a list like this 100 ideas, doesn't serve to prevent anyone from patenting an implementation of such idea, despite it already being published. Articles like these do not serve as 'prior art' when considering patent applications.
Perhaps it wouldn't be so bad if anyone who developed an idea could patent it, but little guys, hobbyists and academics can't afford to without outside funding, whilst the wealthy corporations whose primary motive is profit can patent ideas by the dozen.
If everyone monetized everything our industry would collapse.
It's a balance. Innovation and monetization are different beasts. Some ideas are so awesome they just have to be shared. Techies are smart enough to think bigger if they really wanted and make computing better. I hope my example sets a precedent.
Sharing your idea may make technology better than if you kept it secret.
I agree about the need for sharing, it's disappointing that those with profit driven motivation can ruin it for us though. Anyone with plenty of money could take one of your brief idea descriptions, implement the basic idea and apply for a patent on the idea - preventing you from using your own idea in future even. Those small descriptions do not serve as prior art in the US patent system. Putting ideas out there like you've done should automatically put them in the public domain, and void any later attempt for overly broad patents to cover the same ideas.
I put many of my own ideas out there, usually in discussion threads though, as I'm not a blogger. There's some overlap between ideas I've had myself and your own ideas, such as the package-manager for package-managers, I've discussed several times and experimented with implementation. It just demonstrates further that ideas that are ready for introduction aren't "inventions" at all: they're inevitable next stages of the evolution of ideas. Yet someone who has the money can claim they invented it, and use the legal system to prevent everyone else using it.
Concept of Idea Hub is pretty interesting. For me there is an angle that I haven't really seen explored i.e. a place to collaborate on (develop) high level concepts related to CS and CS applications. Very much alike to what you'have done in some points in your list. E.g. how to apply patterns/concepts from game design to other more traditional fields (your GP examples). I would love to see a place for collaboration centered around this approach--an idea incubator. I see it married to a platform leveraging experimentation around some of those ideas in lean startup style:)
Interesting proposition, but do you have any idea how this could actually work? Where would funding come from initially? Would this be a for-profit or non-profit organization? How would we reach a consensus on anything, given the diversity of the community and other communities? How would we protect ideas, other than developing them? (since this can already be done by anyone, given the resources).
I can't picture how we could create such system in a society built around the complete opposite, where the government backs corporations and fails to acknowledge the innovations of individuals, unless they pay for it.
On a side note, I have many ideas that I've not released, not because I'm worried about someone stealing them, but because they're so far outside any mainstream convention that I'd be seen as a raving lunatic by many if I published them.
>On a side note, I have many ideas that I've not released, not because I'm worried about someone stealing them, but because they're so far outside any mainstream convention that I'd be seen as a raving lunatic by many if I published them.
This is a very good reason for why your idea should be put up for everyone to see. No, I don't mean that they should think you're a lunatic, but because of how awesome it would be if someone just picks up the tiniest bit and develops it.
To go further, a lot of the worlds good ideas (and their inventors/discoverers) have been thought of as lunatic at some point in their existence. It's almost a prerequisite! ;)
> [..] I'm [not] worried about someone stealing them, but because they're so far outside any mainstream convention that I'd be seen as a raving lunatic by many if I published them.
Today? :) If they are really that crazy, this alone is the reason to release them into the wild... and you will feel better to. Ideas are only alive when they are free (as in released) ;p
The real problem is not monetization. The real problem is that most people don't have imagication rich enough to envision how such ideas can improve everyone's lives. I can't recount how many hundreds of times I've heard the notion that current design/technologies are "good enough". Most people don't care about small thing and are totally pessimistic about large things. Pessimism is contagious.
Also, there are no outlets for promoting, discussing or finding projects like the ones described here. And, if that's not enough, integrating anything conceptually new with existing infrastructure is usually a royal pain.
> The problem is most modern computing is driven by the single question: "How can I monetize this idea?" It's only hobbyists and academics that really try to improve the state of computing, rather than having a primary focus on revenue. It's unfortunate that groundbreaking ideas are usually not the moneymakers, else we'd see innovation at a quicker rate.
That is an absolute silly notion. Money is a token of value, so if you're creating value for someone, it shouldn't be too hard to get some money for it.
Examples: The Internet, while initially a public research project, did not take off until it was commercialized. Personal computers and mobile phones - completely transformational technologies, the innovations of which went hand-in-hand with making tons of money. Google and Apple both innovates like crazy and they're two of the most valuable companies on the planet because of it. Much of the best open source software projects are off-shoots of commercial ventures.
The statement, "Money is a token of value, so if you're creating value for someone, it shouldn't be too hard to get some money for it," is ideological and doesn't withstand scrutiny. For example, a mansion would represent enormous value for someone in abject poverty, but they may have no serious ability to compensate you. (This is why we may have bizarre outcomes like roughly as many homeless people as empty hotel rooms and apartments. The allocation system is profoundly irrational.)
I don't see how does your example invalidates mseebach's claim. It wasn't that the compensation was proportional to the value gained, just that if you can provide value, it shouldn't be hard to get money for it. Clearly mansion sellers can get money for the value they provide, even if that means selling to people who have less to gain from the mansions.
Exactly. Often it is not the innovators that end up benefiting from showing everyone the value of a new idea (1). Most innovative work is very long term and there are simply not many channels to fund such work. Innovation is often too far up the pipeline for the originators to reliably extract value. As you point out, the original innovators of the internet and desktop computing are not the ones that ended up with the bulk of the rewards.
Douglas Engelbart and his team innovated, originated and practically invented all of modern computing paradigms and interactions. Engelbert died unable to garner interest in his grander vision of accelerative bootstrapping. I suspect he saw modern incarnations as bizarro implementations, outwardly similar imitations apart in spirit. Those like Bret Victor recognize that spirit. This list shows some of that spirit. I would argue RapGenius qualifies too. Here's hoping this picks up as a trend.
Google and Apple both innovates like crazy
I would dispute that Google and Apple innovate like crazy. They do more polishing and acquiring, with most of the innovative work in service of the product, a benefit but not a new paradigm. Voice recognition, self driving cars, heads up displays, multi-touch,internet blimps. For the dozens of researchers who devoted decades of their lives to this work, the recognition Google and Apple get for things on like that list is bittersweet.
This is not to dispute the tremendous innovative thinking and work it takes to package research to a public ready state, I am merely pointing out that true bellwether innovations (2) often go disproportionately unrewarded.
(1) With a negative income tax and library->hackerspaces, that would very often be perfectly ok. Such people are moved more by vision than by monetary rewards.
(2) Which will themselves be combinations of existing things, the key is they should be the first to inspire with this combination, even if in very rough form. By this definition pagerank and the iphone are the key innovations of Google and Apple.
I actually quite strongly disagree here. A LOT of startups start of as: "how can we make something people want" and not "how can we sell people something." Look at history of all the big companies who didnt start with a business model: Google and Facebook for example. Only later when they grew did they start looking for ways to monetize. Dont get me wrong, I am not saying that there arent companies which do do this, but rather that not all are like this (including some of the very successful ones).
This is just part of the acqui-hire culture in silicon valley: throwing shit against the wall to see what sticks. The idea that you don't need a business model as long as you can grab a large enough userbase, then come up with a business model later, or get aquired, only works when you have lots of venture capital, because relatively few of these startups produce sustainable businesses. This model isn't practiced so much in Europe, where if you want to build a business, you better be considering how to monetize it from the beginning, because there aren't many sources of capital for ideas that don't have a detailed business plan.
I think that a lot of startups would benefit not from disregarding thinking about how they're going to make money, but not making it their primary focus.
We had an idea a few months back for a product we wanted to exist, talked to some other people that also wanted it, built it (total cost ~$120 and lots of free time), got some people to use it, and one of the first thing several of them said is "I wish I could pay a few dollars to do X". We hadn't thought of that.
The point is, we could have said, no there's no point in doing this, the only clear monetization path for us is worth less than the cost in hosting, and killed the idea in January. However, we decided that lots of people would probably use it if it were free, so we built it, and it turns out that we would be able to make it profitable by testing it.
Can someone confirm the patent part? From what I heard an idea is unpatentable as soon as it has been described in public even, from what I heard, if it was in a comic.
You're right, my implication that online posts are not prior art was wrong. I have a negative bias against the patent office from past experience, however it's also not a simple as 'an idea being unpatentable as soon as it is described'.
Firstly, a patent doesn't cover only an abstract idea, but an abstract implementation of an idea. It's a description with a list of claims about how the idea is acheived, which can cite prior art, but the requirement is that a "non-obvious" invention occurs in the claims, which can unfortunately include "combination" of two or more existing ideas.
Given that the author had only described brief ideas, they might serve as prior art, but as they don't really establish claims on what is invented, someone could later come along and take the idea and develop it, coming up with "inventions" in their implementation. Such inventions are probably obvious to someone who takes the time to develop an idea, and would be rediscovered by anyone who starts from the same piece of prior art. A problem is that patent applications always start by using the broadest sense of the "invention" that it covers, and the claims are narrowed down if the application is rejected by the patent office, but applications can be revised and resubmitted many times.
The obviousness of ideas really depends on how much consideration is given to each one, so perhaps it would be in the interest of authors to establish claims on how each of their ideas might be achieved, as patents do (although they shouldn't need to be written in legalese.) Maybe a separate hyperlinked article where more detail is given on each, particularly the ones he cares most about, would surely improve the protection against the ideas being taken.
One of my concerns is the invention of new terms in patent applications which cover already existing ideas. I've seen patents which cover something very obvious, but choose some unknown term to describe it like it's something new.
The other major issue with these ideas is whether they are discoverable by a patent examiner, and proving that they were published prior to a patent application.
I had a discussion with a patent examiner a few years ago, and he pretty much expressed that existing patents, journals and scientific publications are preferred as prior art, because they are easier to verify. Other non-patent literature is googled, and archive.org is sometimes used to confirm publication date, but is unreliable.
However, I've just been reading the manual on patent examination[1] and it turns out that the scope of online publications is quite broad, and that providing a date on the publication is sufficient for an examiner to consider it prior art. They also need to archive a search strategy for each application.
I guess what we can take from that, is to ensure that we always include a publication date, and make an effort to reasonably disseminate the ideas so that they can be easily found by examiners and used as evidence that it was accessible to any patent applicant. Guess that means I should drop a self-hosted wiki and publish on github like the author too.
And if we didn't have a government we wouldn't be funding:
, useless research we're not allowed to use
, the software patent system
, massive amounts of child sexual abuse around the globe by supporting local regimes
, welfare addiction
, destruction of the economy which was solving poverty before we started "solve poverty" campaigns
, wars with which we disagree
, the wholesale destruction of personal privacy by people technologically incapable of protecting the data they gather
, copyright fear mongering
, government-steered news organizations
And here we come to the crux of the free market economy. A system that is purposefully built to harbor unsustainable and frigid behavior. A system that, ultimately, defeats innovation and thinking.
Certainly without such restriction the great minds of the world would be free to ponder the future of human-computer interaction and solve real problems. I am vastly underwhelmed at the state of technology in the year 2013.
The idea of forward-reaching fiction to encourage advances in science and technology is what Neal Stephenson and others are trying to do with Project Hieroglyph.
I've thought of some of these independently. (It's good to see somebody else did too.) We could probably make more progress if we all kept a list like this publicly. Or even privately, with snippets shared where appropriate. I know if I went through some old journals I could scrounge up a decent list myself.
One I had:
Bash scripting in the style of hypercard.
Hypercard was described to me as a system that had a set of functions and let the user make programs out of them. Bash syntax is simple enough that making an interface that gives you the power of shell without degenerating from the original should be possible. The output should be a regular text based bash script, allowing others to edit without the program and the user to see what's going on underneath.
EDIT: A second idea to go with the first:
A utility that allows you to create a GUI window from the command line. This could be used in conjunction with the Bash script editor to make graphical programs that the user can easily incorporate into their (presumably window based) workflow.
Check out NeWS, circa 1990. Or Arthur Van Hoffs HyperNeWs around the same time.
Edit: or Apples MPW shell back in the late 80s had a posixy set of command line tools that came with a shell called "commando". When invoked, it presented a dialog of all the tools options and constructed the command line from your choices. Kind if like training wheels, and it was smart enough to disable conflicting options, or to prompt for paths as appropriate. It showed the command syntax being built up. Eventually, I think it made its way to a/ux in 1992 or so.
I guess the interesting question is, why aren't similar things popular today? I'm guessing the apps you mentioned didn't really become popular in their day either.
> A utility that allows you to create a GUI window from the command line.
Defunct now, but it lets you easily create windows without all that event-basedness that is annoying and unfit for scripts: http://easygui.sourceforge.net/
PowerShell takes a lot of what I dislike about cmd.exe and makes things worse. Many cmdlets assume some form of hidden state that isn't documented. Despite needing to use it, I often do so holding my nose. I really wish Windows would adapt the unix paradigm for command line...
This feels like what Automator is. It's definitely not as powerful as Hypercard was, but just for shell stuff its very cool. Not text based, but it can help accomplish A LOT of bulk processes.
This a well of useful and thought-provoking ideas.
I would like to point out a general theme though. A lot of these ideas seem most relevant to technical savvy people and I think why a lot of them (especially UI stuff) have not been implemented is because interfaces must cater to everybody.
Perhaps what we need more of is a dev mode switch (s/w or h/w) like the Chromebook has which enables a lot of these ideas so that the ordinary user is not overwhelmed.
Some of the ideas in the list are aimed at a general audience though. So perhaps each entry in the list needs to make a note of who the target audience is.
A lot of these are already done, like command autocomplete.
Many show a lack of vision, why are we thinking about putting buttons and windows all over the place, adding complex nonstandard headers willy-nilly to our emails when we could be thinking about important things like indexing the vast power of existing UNIX tools in a voice-controlled environment?
One thing I've wanted for years is a small, pocket-sized and battery operated blob of storage with a well-defined API, where all of my data lives. Not the cloud, because no, thank you; and not an external drive. I want something that my phone, my laptop, my TV, my workstation can use as a canonical data storage location for everything in my life.
Ideally this would have a fast radio, so I could just leave it in my bag while I'm walking around listening to music on my phone; and a high-speed physical connection so I can plug it in if necessary.
One I keep noodling on is the one 'Ethical Me' which, on its face works well for ethics but it works for other things as well. Like documenting things you bought because they were 'more secure' or 'higher quality' etc. Understanding the meta-data of what is security 'worth' or quality 'worth' would really help inform product managers about whether or not investing resources there makes sense from a product desirability standpoint.
Perhaps it would be linked with variables, similar to how graphical debuggers can give you a "variables" window which shows variables in scope, and the ability to filter such variables. I suppose the idea is to extend the terminal to be more debugger/IDE like.
It allows one to comment on the evolution of code rather than on individual sections of it. Currently, there is not a good place to write down why things have evolved the way they did. There is a search/filtering interface to find only the interesting bits of history.
The added features of email metadata can be achieved without the added complexities of adding metadata to all email, with a simple NLP solution. Gmail already does this with date recognition and google calendar integration, as well as the new email 'categories.' It'll be cool to see it expand so any application can take advantage of it (i.e. key management software and joining a new website).
What would be great is a kind of gmail (or any email client) app store. You give permission to different applications to work on top of your email client to react to different email content. ie Mint/your bank automatically adding item receipts to the card purchase it has access too.
No. 36 Reminds me of Knuth's literate programming, which I attribute as the major reason for the continuing success of TeX/LaTeX. It needs a major rethink/revamp to move it on to the full spectrum of computer languages (what is available in python or haskell) is not fully satisfactory and has not really caught on.
I had high hopes for this and was immediately turned off by #3. I still can't believe that their are developers who believe that design is just the pretty layer on top of their functioning infrastructure. It's not.
That said, I wish there was a site that connected people with complementary skill sets around similar product ideas.
The idea is to connect someone who has created something technical and useful in concept with someone who can create a wonderful user experience out of it. These are not always the same people.
I think what he's saying (and I tend to agree) is that you can't develop the technical side in isolation from the actual design. Design is much more than appearance -- it determines how your site works, how parts interact, and can very often give immense direction to the backend.
I agree with your idea (#3) but only as the reverse -- imagine a website of "ideas" and mockups waiting for people to implement them. I believe great apps start with design, not with a backend. (Of course you can write them in either order -- the point is to have considered and drafted a design before starting on the backend).
There's an idea I've been thinking about in the vein of the "create this" and api competition ideas (and the repo itself I suppose). I've found that on Stack Overflow questions of the form "Is there software that does x, y and x?" will often get locked. However, I think a site like SO for finding software could be really useful. And when you don't find it you've just identified a niche that hasn't been filled that someone could come along and make software for. It would be possible for developers to gauge demand by the number of up-votes/bounties a post gets. It could use many of the same mechanisms from SO like voting/comments/reputation/merging related posts, but perhaps adding some structured ways to describe ideas would facilitate better searching.
Well, number 9 already exists in some form on OS X. You can't drag because it drags the window, but if you click on the file name in the title you get a dialog with some file options (rename, move, duplicate, ...).
The email metadata idea reminds me of EDIFACT, or at least what it was intended for - a standard electronic format for commercial transactions. It predates the WWW though, so looks quite 'ugly' by today's standard of using markup language to describe data. However I think it would be a good starting point for coming up with a broadly applicable data schema.
I came up with most of these ideas independently. If you look at them, you'll realize that most share the same patterns, and actually are similar ideas.
I'm currently working on something that superficially looks like #4, but includes at least 20% (potentially more) of these ideas (or make them obsolete).
Most of them are trivial, and I'm sure much of us didn't get anything new from this list. Heck, I could come up with 50 more just like that (but maybe not that related to programming).
Do you know if it has an API? It would be nice if it was a standard piece of architecture available on the desktop environment without creating completely dedicated dialogs. There would be some way to define how interfaces are to be merged.
Clever! If an email is sent as html, it is obvious that microformats could be imbedded, just as they can be on web pages. Hadn't thought about that before.
I'm waiting for the sparrowOS guy to comment on this thread. Despite his hell-banned status, I've been impressed with what he as an individual has come up with. He seems likely to have implemented many of these features for his edification.
on the Package Manager-Package Manager front (idea 12), i bet you could bastardize chef to do this. it already has the translation layer for multiple package managers (yum, apt, pkg-add, etc).
Every application develops until it contains a sketchy rewrite of apt-get. Not just languages - WordPress and MediaWiki are going that way too. We really need a bunch of standard interfaces to package management.
I find 54 particularly interesting, a site with detailed overviews of different stacks, along with instructions, or links to instructions on how to get started would be very valuable.
Doesn't bash already do something vaguely similar though? I noticed it can complete flags and options now. zsh has been capable of this for a long time too.
It doesn't convert between long and short options or sort arguments but it does help you by offering the completion which means less typing and slightly less memorization.
Sure, but it would be great if it went a little further: "... and/or provides a documentation panel for that argument". Having a one-liner to explain what ls's `--dired` does without having to drop down to a new line and look it up would be great, displaying the first sentence of the relevant section of the man page could be enough?
Doesn't zsh do something like this? At the very least, it seems to be extensible enough that you could provide completion+manpage documentation if you wanted to.
some of these are really interesting ideas. I have one to add to the mix: go implement them! As technologists we all have unprecedented power to create change at our fingertips and I'd love it if you could come back with a list of great ideas, _with some of them implemented already_.
[note] the biggest one for me is the "life engine" - I would happily pay you £50/month for this!
Meh. A lot of these sound like those ideas that any programmer comes up with, about what would be great, without ever actually putting the sweat in to turn a vague idea into something that actually works.
I have probably as many half-baked schemes in the back of my mind. We probably all do. Why is this list particularly interesting?
Heck, lots of these ideas sound downright bad. Adding operations for "put in new folder" and "pull out of folder"? Don't we already have plenty of ways to do this? A basic set of primitives (create new folder, move files to folder, whether done through the UI or on the command line), allows you to compose those simple actions into the more complex ones, rather than having some giant menu of everything you could ever possibly want to do with files that you need to navigate through.
I'm just not sure what the value of long lists of vague, half-baked features ideas for random software is. Why not actually build one or two of these? That would be far more interesting.
A lot of ideas start out half-baked, in brainstorming sessions, etc. Even if you don't like the ideas here, judging from other comments it's at least thought-provoking. And this person basically opened up their private journal of ideas for anyone to look at.
Maybe we need more forwarding-reaching fiction in our world. More essays on computing futurology, grand envisioning of what we can achieve with software. Even ambitious prototypes of a new way to do something (like Lighttable)
A lot of what I see are tooling details, lot of boring effort duplication on mostly-identical languages and lot of nitpicking/bikeshedding comments like: well, you may have a good idea for solving world cancer, but your article does not work in my weird mobile browser, so your credibility is shot.
Where's our version of "The Mother of all Demos" ?