Comment by tolmasky | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tolmasky | Hacker News Reader

I honestly thought this was meant to be a joke or sarcastic or something. Unfortunately it wasn't, and this really highlights to me a growing feeling I've had since iOS first launched that all of our best talent is working on absolutely the worst and most boring ideas. In other words, being completely wasted.

There are SO many calculators, to-do, and weather apps. This wouldn't normally be a problem if it wasn't for the fact that many actual great developers and designers are working on these too. Why would anyone with this kind of talent consider making a weather app? Even if its the best weather app in the universe, its still just the best weather app in the universe. It's as ridiculous as fantasizing about owning the weather channel.

This is why we end up with apps that are all form over function, because there's no problem left to solve, just minor quibbles and preferences to satisfy ("oh I wish the to-do app had projects AND sub projects!").

You can view the weather ONLINE. Yes, perhaps there is a magical experience someone may be able to bring to the weather, but that's missing the point. The point is that weather, and to-do, and calendaring, and calculators, are all solved problems, and while they can be done better there exist a whole slew of new apps that no one has imagined possible before on touch and mobile thanks to iPhone and iPad.

I say this because I respect these developers and I know they're capable of so much more. Just look at GarageBand. More people should be thinking about the next GarageBand.

Weather is not a solved problem. Your vision in the solution space is just limited.

We have some extremely talented people working on Stormpulse and the size of the underserved market is staggering.

And yes, we have an iPad app launching this summer. :)

If you are referring to understanding weather better, or tracking it better, or using it in "big problems" like air traffic control better, then sure. But I think its pretty clear that what's being talked about by the author is the casual consumer space, specifically because he cites the iPhone weather app as one of the better examples of a weather app, and lists "casually checking it every day" as a primary use case. And in the consumer space, I highly doubt that 10 years from now we'll look and say "wow, iPad really changed the way I check the weather in the morning, and thus, the world."

I know you're being sarcastic but checking the weather the weather app on the my iPhone (and previously, on my Android phones) is one of my primary use cases of the phone, however sad this may be. It's the first thing to do in the morning, even before I leave the bed. I check the weather on my phone. The weather app must be good enough that I'll have a good understanding of the weather conditions of that day even when I'm still half-asleep. The lack of a good weather app on a platform is a complete dealbreaker for me and I'd be gladly paying for a really good one. And I don't think I'm alone with that.

> It's the first thing to do in the morning, even before I leave the bed.

Unless you're a landscaper or something, I have to say this sounds a little on the crazy side.

Clearly you never lived in England.

Agreed in that I wouldn't take his request as a call to arms for making something that only applies in low-stakes situations.

But his point about making weather accessible to consumer levels of expertise is spot on.

I agree. Here's a crazy idea: App creators are limiting themselves. They don't think in the big picture. They play it save. All because previous App denials have made it terribly expensive to create something and then be shut down at the last step.

Where is the next Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Photoshop, Hypercard, Eclipse, XCode, Visual Studio, browser extensible with plugins like Firefox, vmware, Bittorrent, Protools, Cubase, Live, Avid, FCP, Maya, Blender, Max, Aftereffects or Dreamweaver?

Well, quite a few of them have been actively banned by Apple.

I haven't seen any really complex new Apps for the iPad, where somebody invested heavily. Games don't count, they are very rarely killed by Apple. Ports don't count neither, there is less investment there.

Where are the big investments?

I've seen 5 so far: Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Garageband, and TheDaily. 4 from Apple and 1 from Murdoch, created with the personal guarantee by Murdoch's buddy Jobs that it will reach customers.

Could somebody comment? Are there app creators that indeed play it save? Are there others that are investing big time and have just not reached their 1.0 yet?

http://www.photographybay.com/2011/03/30/photoshop-for-ipad-...

I expect this to be based on Adobe Air, though. That makes it a multi-platform investment. Also, I am not sure this is 'big time' for Adobe.

Well, a few people are working on Powerpoint replacements.

But the problem with the complex set you show is that those kinds of applications can take millions of dollars to get to a point where they can compete.

I have a great idea of how to take Excel down, for example. However, when I tallied up the hours it would take just to get to an MVP, it was far out of my range, and far out of three people unless we locked ourselves in a room for a year. To get to an MVP. To compete with something that many businesses get with Word.

You can't beat Excel from the bottom up, because LibreOffice already has that world. The key in that world, I believe, is to attack at the top. Big excel spreadsheets are a nightmare to handle. There's no good way to version control. VBA is easy to turn into spaghetti code. It's expensive to develop ways to see your business intelligence data, whether by packages such as Xcelcius or custom solutions taking a developer's time.

It's the wrong arena to compete on price, but you need a large subset of Excel's features to get to the point where you can tackle that fish.

Or, you can try to make a hit in the app world to prove you have the chops so you can get investment for your bigger ideas.

Disagree that it's a waste. Yesterday's bookstore is today's cloud computing infrastructure. Today's weather app may be tomorrow's <whatever>. Getting people coding, shipping and excited about what they're doing will yield positive results later. I'm also a believer in nurturing genius. Ideas and innovation start from a slow simmer while working on seemingly mundane problems.

No offense to app devs, but I don't think they represent "the best and the brightest". Those types are working at Google on voice recognition, self-driving cars. Or they're working on Cisco working on scaling the internet. No offense to Marco, who's probably a better programmer than I, but he always came across to me as a really good product and design guy. Someone who has a knack for UX but can also program. I think working on these "problems" is a good place for him.

What gets me is when Facebook starts hiring the best engineers away from Google and Microsoft to go work on Deals and Messages. That Lars Rasmussen built Maps (one of Google's 2 killer apps) and the awe-inspiring, but before it's time Wave, and now is doing who knows what trivial (though I'm sure technically hard) thing at Facebook is a real shame.

There's different kinds of best. I think its fair to say that a lot these people are the best when it comes to the scoped problem of consumer apps (and similarly, the Google guys are terrible at this, and they're both important fronts -- I don't think Google could have pulled of the original Mac which is just as important as many of the problems they work on). And as such, I don't feel that because you are "just" a consumer app guy its fair to essentially say stick to these trivialities.

Imagine the design sense of some of these guys applied to medical or scientific apps. It would be incredible. I see my father use the most horrific and inefficient web interfaces in the universe to find papers or do gene cutting. Now there's a space waiting to be disrupted with usability.

I disagree that this is solved. Although Marco talks mostly about UX (being a UX guy), there is a lot to do on the backend, and I don't mean in weather prediction. For example, most of the data comes from a few sources (Bing even lists all of them, gross!). Why aren't these apps "grading" the forecasts after the fact and using that data to weigh which gets shown to the user? I can go on, there's a lot more than just UX needing to be worked on.

First of all, I don't think that any of these are solved problems besides maybe calculator.

But even granting that they are, having the vision to find an ambitious and original project is part of what it means to be "capable of so much more," and is not a common skill.

One thing I think is really interesting is that in the App Store categories Weather is a top level category, right next to Music, News, Education and so on.

I personally wonder if not the only thing that drives the weather-app market on iOS is Apple listing Weather as its own category.

Disclaimer: I'm the creator of Degrees, Weather for your Mac http://itunes.apple.com/app/degrees/id430173763?mt=12

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