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You stand under the shower, hot water runs down your spine, and then BOOM, you've got The Idea. Or you drive back from work, angry on all those idiots on the road and again - a moment of enlightenment, The Idea just jumps into your head.

Do you have those moments? I do, I do more often that I'd like. Usually when I'm frustrated with a pesky thing at work, at home or generally, in my life. More often then not, those Ideas concern the uber-cool applications I could build.

Sometimes after a couple of days or a week The Idea starts looking pale. I realize it's not at all so cool, that it actually sucks. But lot's of them really looks promising. To me, at least.

So, this is a couple of apps I'd really like to build. I'm not thinking about solving some big problems - I want to solve mine.

Learning site

I actually built one. It helps me learning Japanese. I won't give you the link here because it really sucks. It's horrible. When I created it two years ago I knew next to nothing about web design or usability. I didn't even know what I wanted. I've been using the site for two years now and I think I know how I should have done it in the first place. So I just have to roll up my sleeves and do it.

Trips site

I want to have a nice trip from time to time. The problem is I'm running out of trip ideas. I've visited all interesting places in my area. I want to know where can I spend a nice day or a nice weekend.

Or consider this: I'm going to Tuscany for vacation. I know a lot of nice places to visit there but I want to know more. I read tourist guides but it's not enough.

So, the idea for the app is simple: a place people can recommend each other's nice trip ideas. Not just "this is a nice building to see" but a outline of a trip. I'd really like that.

News Reader

I know, there are dozens of news readers out there. What I'm missing from every single one of them is to learn what interests me and what doesn't. I subscribe over 200 feeds. The amount of reading every day gets overwhelming. I want the software to learn my preferences and recommend me interesting thing selected from those feeds. It can be done by a simple Bayesian classifier on the content of the notes. I'm pretty sure somebody done it somewhere. It's too simple, too obvious. Yet I can't find site like that.

Task tracking site

I was reading Dreaming in code the other day and I came up with the idea of a kind of organizer. I'm still not sure what I actually want to do, but the starting point is something like this: take a mail, a calendar, a task list, make them interchangeable (a mail is a task, a calendar event is a mail), add smart tagging and tracking, shake (don't stir) and you've got a novel organizer.

BMScheme

The last concept for today is something that will not solve anyone's problem, even mine. I actually started working on it a couple of months ago. It's Boring Meeting Scheme! A Scheme implementation developed during boring meetings. The objectives of the projects are a/ not to fall asleep during a meeting and b/ learn something new. I'm implementing in in Ocaml (just to make it more interesting). Unfortunately I'm not having any boring meetings recently (hard to believe, ain't it?), so the project has not yet reached the state where I could show it to anyone. But I don't abandon hope and I'm sure I'll get back to it soon.

Well, that would be it. A couple of nice ideas, absolutely no time to work on them. Anyone know a way to add couple of free hours to a day?

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