Things that Should Exist

1. Dream Recorder

   So according to physics, anything that's an engine is also a generator. (Just run it in reverse, dummy.)

   Well, I know almost nothing about the human brain, but it would be pretty cool if we could apply the generator/engine model to the visual center of the brain in order to record dreams. This, of course, relies on figuring out where dream visions differ from real visions; that is, clearly you don't just dream about the backs of your eyelids (at this point, half my audience closes their eyes to see what the backs of their eyelids look like - admit it), so somewhere between cone/rod and the innermost processing a misfire has to take place. If it originates really close to the outside world in the optic nerve, then we've got some potential!

   Now we just need to do some research and then find test subjects who will let us put wireless transmitters on their optic nerves.

2. MP3 Tagger

   I'd like to be able to put little digital sticky notes on my mp3s. A note could attach to a whole song or just a few seconds. Then, you could send all the notes to a friend as a file, and the friend's reader would pop the notes up when the song is played. Like the little notes in MS Word, but for music. It's important that they be able to be restricted to a small portion of a song, since, for example, I may not like the whole song, but want to point out a "really cool drum solo" or something. This software would have nothing to do with music piracy, since it's dependent upon you both having copies of the same song. Unfortunately, if you want the stickies to be applied automatically, you'd need to use a music format that has track information (ID3, for example); if not, you'd have to apply the stickies manually.

3. Filesystem URL Symlinks

   Unix, Linux, Mac, etc. all have a great feature called symlinks - basically virtual copies of a file. They come in two versions: "hard" symlinks act as full copies of the file, but don't have the original content, while "soft" symlinks act like really thin wrappers so you can basically call a file by two different names (great for directory shortcuts and the like).

   Now that OSs like OSX are starting to come with webservers preinstalled, I'd like to see a third category: URL symlinks: things that act like files but are really handled by the web server. The following example should illuminate: I've got iTunes, which uses an XML file for its library data. But let's say I'd like to have it use a database instead (maybe to do reporting, or in the hopes that it does lookups faster), or have it use a web url (so all my computers use the same library file, say). I could have my local web server take over the responsibility for the "file" /Library/iTunes/library.xml or whatever. It would accept reads and writes just like any other file (so long as I enabled those permissions), but would actually forward the requests to a servlet. I see this as the next evolution in web servers. We're almost there with wikis, but not quite.