Prompt's TechBlog

My Dream App is a contest where aspiring software designers compete for the opportunity to have their software built and sold, bringing them royalties. It's a bit like Pop Idol for geeks. Voting has just opened on the 24 finalists. Remember, you decide!

While there are some nice ideas there, a lot of them wouldn't have lasted long in Alan Sugar's boardroom. Some of the proposals sounded more like features than viable shareware applications in their own right. Now the word processor, spreadsheet, presentation and web browser have been invented it's hard to come up with the next revolution.

Voting is fairly evenly split so far. There are 24 applications and the vote share for most hovers around the 4% they would get if votes were shared out fairly.

My favourite was a tool for turning your singing or whistling into MIDI data for feeding into music software. The software is also supposed to take someone's finger drumming and turn it into real drumming. That's a tool I can see people having fun with and finding useful. A new way of creating cartoon animations was well-thought-out (it needs to export into Flash, mind). There is a fun productivity tool too, that observes what applications you use and uses it to nourish an animated plant. Use Excel and Word and it gets healthier. Play Quake and it starts to wither.

Software for wardrobe planning, recipe management and putting pets online probably has a (massive?) market out there somewhere, but nobody's struggling to live without them. It's disappointing to see yet another multiplayer game stealing ahead as well. You'd think that's the kind of thing that there were enough of in the world, or enough other ways to finance at least.

Through the contestants' blogs, we can get to know them like they're on reality TV. Will there be goodies and baddies? Will one of the judges make some poor geek cry? There's at least one thing this does better than reality TV: voting is free.