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I Want a Pony: Snapshots of a Dream Productivity App
Merlin Mann | Jan 5 2005
There’s an early episode of The Simpsons where Homer learns he has a long-lost half-brother named Herb who’s a major automobile mogul. Out of love for his newfound family, Herb lets Homer design and build his ultimate car. The result is a piece of pure American id, in which Homer’s most extravagant obsessions combine to create an unmanufacturable $82,000 boondoggle—complete with bubble windows and a place to put a really, really big fountain drink. In that pioneering national spirit of favoring geegaws and fantastic chimeras over practicality, here are a few completely random ideas about a notional productivity application I’d like to see someday (as well as few bitches about the lame state of the ones we have now). See, the thing of it is, there must be something in the air right now, because I’ve talked to no fewer than six (6) people in the last three months who want to build some kind of a new productivity app. I must say, the ideas so far are varied and novel in their approaches to tackling a basic set of problems. There’s a good deal of overlap to be sure, but there’s enough divergence to make me tell one particularly talented friend:
So here you go. A bunch of nutty bullets about a non-existent program:
There’s a million other specifics that I won’t go into just now (fast and savable searches, endless import/export options, robust support for structured text everywhere …), but I at least wanted to give a flavor for what’s important to me and the way that I like to work. I suspect that most of us feel kind of stuck right now; there are a few servicable (but extremely dull and inflexible) productivity apps with which we’ve had to learn to satisfice. Our expectations have gotten depressingly low, and, unfortunately, they’ve been glumly met at most every turn. Bloated proprietary formats, locked up information, non-standard menus and key commands, and totally weak categorizing are just the beginning of the problems in a vertical that, to me, has been feeling moribund for five or more years now. It’ll be interesting to see whether Apple pulls out this rumored iWork package at MacWorld next week, but that still leaves us with scant options for integrated calendaring, mail, and note-taking. Regardless of what Apple does, I would still love to see the nerds keep collaborating openly on novel solutions for collecting, mining, organizing, and streamlining the way we deal with the growing amount of “stuff” in our lives. I'm not necessarily asking for a silver bullet in a single app or one Great Idea™—these things take time, iteration, and patience. It's just that there are so many wonderful sites and web apps that are getting aspects of this exactly right. Shouldn’t we expect at least some fraction of that power and innovation from the software that runs our lives? So: “blue sky.” What do you want from an unlimitedly awesome productivity app? What’s your biggest hangup with whatever your current apps are? 66 Comments
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About MerlinBio Merlin Mann is an independent writer, speaker, and broadcaster. He’s best known for being the guy who created the website you’re reading right now. He lives in San Francisco, does lots of public speaking, and helps make cool things like You Look Nice Today, Back to Work, and Kung Fu Grippe. Also? He’s writing this book, he lives with this face, he suffers from this hair, he answers these questions, and he’s had this life. So far. Merlin’s favorite thing he’s written in the past few years is an essay entitled, “Cranking.” |
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