[Ghoser777]

I thought this was interesting topic of discussion - what's your favorite program that you wrote that went absolutely nowhere. By that I mean:

a) It died because you didn't have enough time/expertise/etc to finish/support it
b) It died because no one used it/bought it/etc
c) It died because no one liked it but you (slightly different than b's scenario).

For me:
a) Meteorologist
b) State Tool (I thought I was on a gold mind... till I sold one license)
c) None... yet

[Ghoser777]

Haha... maybe I should have made this "your favorite thread that went nowhere" thread.

Matt Fahrenbacher

[Catfish_Man]

FastFind. A promising project my friend and I started that stalled due to the lack of an api for watching an entire filesystem for changes (kqueue seemed good, but it's limited by the maxvnodes setting, and I'm not sure if tweaking that up a lot is safe).

[Detrius]

http://homepage.mac.com/whschultz/vectorcalc/index.html

I'm still working on this one, but I haven't gotten a lick of feedback about it. I've been working on it for a good year and a half. I'm working on a 1.0 with registration restrictions, but considering that virtually no one has downloaded the most recent beta, I doubt it will get me anywhere. I have plans to take the expression parser and turn it into a 2D graphing program and then later a 3D graphing program, but there are plenty of those out there already...

Oh well. I have to keep plugging away if I ever want to get a programming job... Double majored in Math and Computer Science, but I couldn't get anyone to pay me any attention (including Omni *ahem*). At least I got three interviews with Apple.

Now I'm a lowly technician spending most of my off time plugging away so I'm not stuck on the bench for the rest of my life.

[ohm^n]

The economy sucks Detrius, go get a masters in CS

[Arclite]

c) iWish.

I thought this program idea ruled, but I lost all heart on this comment:

Comment by MeTaL: Why the hell would I want to pay for this app. It will be useful for one period of the year - or if you're not a nerd but human like me, then a radical idea might be an old-fashioned paper list.

[Detrius]

Originally posted by ohm^n:
The economy sucks Detrius, go get a masters in CS

Wish I could afford it... I have too much debt hanging over my head from my BS.

I just responded to an email from Adobe... we'll see how that works out.

[Arclite]

Originally posted by Ghoser777:
a) Meteorologist

Wow. I just downloaded this, and I must say, it's the best weather app I've ever seen. It's a keeper for me. Very clean-looking, and very well built. Good job.

[absmiths]

Originally posted by Arclite:
Wow. I just downloaded this, and I must say, it's the best weather app I've ever seen. It's a keeper for me. Very clean-looking, and very well built. Good job.

Yeah, I used Meteorologist forever until I upgraded to Panther, lost my login items, and kinda got tired of the app breaking every 2 to 3 days (not the authors fault).

[seanb]

Originally posted by Arclite:
c) iWish.

I thought this program idea ruled, but I lost all heart on this comment:

I agree, this could be a pretty cool app for parents or anyone with a big holiday shopping list. I think the place you went wrong was charging a dollar for it. The $1 isn't enough to make much of a difference in your finances, but it's definitly enough to deter a large percentage of potential users. Give the simple apps away for free and get your name out into the world, then charge for the kick ass program you make down the road.

[CharlesS]

For me, it would have to be DockDisks. I had planned to make it much better than it is, but there's been very, very little interest, so it's just kind of languished. One of these days I'll probably end up just taking the beta expiration off and declaring no further development will be done on it.

[diamondsw]

I made the mistake of doing a monolithic rewrite of my only piece of shareware, moving from FutureBASIC (those were the days) to C++ (I finally saw the light). Got it about 80% done and then two things happened:

1) College, job, and the rest is history
2) I learned something about software design and realized 70% of what I'd written was crap.

I toy with the idea of reviving it at some point and releasing it free, but I haven't gotten over my problems with Objective-C, and I'm none too fond of Carbon. That and time is as scarce a resource as it ever was...

Cool thread, Matt. Miss your work on Meteo.

(and you don't really want to look at this, but the program was MacMath Pro )

[hengx]

I miss FinderPop

I used it in the pre OS X days and now it's gone. Bwahaaaha

[sixer]

I spent the good part of last summer writing an application to let students take notes on their laptops in class--basic drawing, text, equations along with shortcuts for common things. My classes started up again and it wasn't to the point where I saw the effort paying off, so I just let it go to pursue other stuff. Definitely not a waste, though--I learned a ton of Cocoa and would recommend diving headfirst into a project like that if you really want to learn the API.

[absmiths]

I wrote a Java IDE once that featured compiler and editor plugins and even had a pluggable scripting system. I originally built in back in '97 to fill a gap in Linux Java development, but once JBuilder/NetBeans/Forte/... hit the market, my app was history. It did do well on Classic Mac, though, for which there is still no good cheap IDE. I was able to sell about 50 licenses ($20), though, so it wasn't a complete waste, and I learned alot about good and bad UI design (architecturally and ergonomically), like never embed critical app code into UI components - very inflexible!

[absmiths]

Originally posted by Ghoser777:
b) State Tool (I thought I was on a gold mind... till I sold one license)

You may have a golden mind, but that is usually referred to as a Gold Mine. I wouldn't have said anything but it just struck me as funny (Gold, shiny head).

[natan]

Originally posted by sixer:
I spent the good part of last summer writing an application to let students take notes on their laptops in class--basic drawing, text, equations along with shortcuts for common things. My classes started up again and it wasn't to the point where I saw the effort paying off, so I just let it go to pursue other stuff. Definitely not a waste, though--I learned a ton of Cocoa and would recommend diving headfirst into a project like that if you really want to learn the API.

I'm currently writing a student notetaking app and would be very interested if you would consider showing us what you accomplished

[itai195]

Last xmas I worked on a Mac OS X version of the old PalaceChat client, which was never carbonized. But then I went back to work and never finished it. There's also a competing client that was ahead of me in terms of features, but didn't have as nice of a GUI.

One of these days I'd like to spend some time writing a nice personal finance app, as I have yet to find a decent one for the Mac.

[sixer]

I'm currently writing a student notetaking app and would be very interested if you would consider showing us what you accomplished

I had hoped to create something I could realistically use in my engineering classes--no small feat when you consider the possibilities for equations, diagrams, etc. One big problem is that there are a lot of good applications out there that *almost* fufill the requirements. A combination of TeXShop or LyX and xfig has the potential to work almost all the time, and even something like MS Word can be a pretty good notetaking tool. So long as you don't need equation or diagramming support, TextEdit (or jEdit, my current favorite) work fine.

My goals coming into the project were to learn Cocoa and Objective-C, experiment with a tabbed interface with a file browser (going against everything in the aqua HIG), and hopefully come up with something I could be proud of. Because I was learning as I went, I first made the program support txt, rtf, and pdf files. The diagramming (with templates for graphs, tables, etc.) is originally based on Apple's example Sketch application. At this point the program will allow you open and edit files--I'm most proud of the file browser interface in the drawer, however.

If I were going forward, equation support would be an interesting proposition. It would be trivial so support latex through Equation Service, but I've never really tried to write TeX in real time so I'm not sure how it would work out. I guess it would also be possible to write a translator from a more intuitive language for equations (like the infix found on TI calculators) to TeX, but who knows.

I had also hoped to include bookmarks for important ideas in particular documents and the ability to extract bookmarked stuff to create larger, review type documents. The ability to take notes on top of PDF lecture notes would also be possible and cool. Finally, I think any application like this would have to offer the ability to make template diagrams.

Anyway I'm working on some smaller, less ambitious Cocoa projects now so maybe they'll see the light of day soon. Working on this while also carrying a full time job gave me a lot of respect for the people out there who donate their free time to open source projects.

Here's a screenshot (forgive the icons--I drew them myself

[nufferkay]

I started a desktop blogging app b/c I couldn't find anything that properly supported the metaWeblog API. I got about halfway through before I realized that poor structural planning had leanded me with a mess of code that was going nowhere, plus I was busy with other stuff that left me with little time or inclination to start over.

But the best part about failed projects is how much you learn that you can apply to the next one. I just had an idea for another project and even if this one turns out to be cr**, I know it'll get a lot further than the last one!