Mobile Apps (link)

My colleague Dave wrote a post about mobile apps on his blog that fits perfectly. And he's right, those apps would make a lot of sense.

A Screenshot Plugin for my Parents

Standard situation: My wife is on skype with her parents. Something on the other end doesn't work. They discuss for 20 minutes before my wife even knows what the issue is.

What we need is a plugin for pidgin, skype, adium and others that allows someone to take a screenshot with one button. A preview would then pop up and the user could touch (or click on) the region where the issue is. The screenshot would then be sent through and displayed on the other end.

My stepmother would push the button, click on the area of the screenshot and my wife would then see the screenshot with an enlarged set-in.

Alternatively, my wife could hit a button and the screenshot would be requested on my stepmother's machine.

Would be a life saver. Or at least a good time saver.

A "Social Meta Network" Site

Data portability is a good thing, I guess, but it does not immediately solve my issue: I'm sick of entering and maintaining my personal data on about a dozen sites.

The solution: A site that reads my information from any one site (or from my openid) and maintains it on all the others. That way I would only need to maintain one profile, say the one on Linkedin, and the software would update all the others. Or, I could edit my profile on my meta site directly.

My meta site would also show me news and information about all the contacts I have across all social networks (a bit like spokeo.com), and it has to be able to understand that some people have multiple accounts (e.g. via a merge feature like the one in pidgin).

Wouldn't that be a pip?

A "CSS Consolidator" or Tree-based CSS Editor

I was trying some new layout on a couple of my web pages the other day.

Whenever I do that I always end up with a bunch of different CSS files all over the place, and it becomes increasingly different over time to keep them clean.

Being a programmer, I'd like to follow the DRY directive: don't repeat yourself. In order to do so, my CSS files would ideally be organised in a hierarchy: some CSS directives apply to all my pages, so they should end up in global.css, while others apply only to the astronomy section of my pages and should therefore be in astro.css.

Also, I like to seperate CSS files according to function (layout.css vs. typo.css).

In the end, I always have enough of those files to lose overview.

What I would need is a tool that displays all of my CSS directives along with where they come from. That way, I could move them easily from one file to another, or up/down the hierarchy if needed.

The tool must have an automatic consolidation feature that would move directives up the tree as far as possible.

I would not want to be able to graphically browse through my (X)HTML and apply CSS rules using the mouse. I would really want this tool to be able to work on existing or create a hierarchy of CSS files.

Does that make sense?

Foto Timer or Meditation Timer for Windows Mobile

I really should port Foto Timer or Meditation Timer to Windows Mobile (or Pocket PC, or whatever the name is, currently) for two reasons: first of all, Palm OS seems to be "on the way out". Secondly, lot's of smartphones use Windows Mobile.

I simply do not have the time to rewrite Foto Timer and Meditation Timer, currently. And I only have an old Compaq iPac to test it on, not the most sexy device ever...

On the other hand, of all the software I will never write, this is the most probably to materialize some day :-)