From time to time I come up with ideas which, for whatever reason, I can’t work on right now.

Rather than jealously guarding these ideas, I’m going to post them here in regular bursts, in case someone out there wants to run with them.

Most importantly, sharing your ideas triggers something unexpected: it forces you to come up with new ones.

Office Printer As A Service

Maintaining your own office printer is tiresome and costly. If you get a decent printer, it’s expensive and toner cartridges will easily add up and cost many times more.

I’d gladly pay a rate per page (or print job) for a service that printed my documents on a top-quality colour laser printer and mailed them to me in the normal post – within 1 or 2 business days.

Bonus points for software that actually installs as a printer on my Mac so I can print like normal, and just wait for the printout to come through my door.

Git For Everyone

The Git version control system, simplified and re-made for everyday users who work on Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, etc.

They’d open a file (branch), make their changes and save (commit) and then the owner could choose to merge those changes in (pull requests). Of course, the entire change history is retained and documents can be reverted back if needed. Great for audit purposes and collaboration across teams.

Lots of organisations could the add power and simplicity of Git to their document management with such a system.

All previous idea dump posts are here.

Idea dump.

But, it might not all be bad news.

This move could be the catalyst for a whole new market of software: software which allows normal people to protect their privacy online.

A simple, easy to use email encryption plugin, or a consumer-friendly version of Tor are possible and could find a huge new market: everyone in the UK.

Tools like PGP and Tor are powerful but hard for the ‘normal’ user to understand, install and use. In the same way that it’s always been possible to use rsync to back up your computer – Dropbox made it simple.

Such a privacy product could be made to allow regular, non-technical people to protect their personal data online.

If you’re looking for an idea to start a web business around, maybe personal privacy is a good place to start.

You tend to hear about startups when they are successful but not when they are struggling. This creates a systematically distorted perception that companies succeed overnight. Almost always, when you learn the backstory, you find that behind every “overnight success” is a story of entrepreneurs toiling away for years, with very few people except themselves and perhaps a few friends, users, and investors supporting them.

http://cdixon.org/2012/03/16/the-myth-of-the-overnight-success/

The Raspberry Pi however, won’t work for the purposes I keep hearing about. Here’s why: the barriers they aim to tackle with a low-cost device aren’t cost-related.

Children need teaching, support and inspiration to want to get into building things using computers. The Pi is cheap, yes, but it’s hardly convenient.

Easy, cheap (or free) routes into coding already exist; what’s to stop a kid heading to a library and hitting tryruby – learning the basics of a popular web language? Or even simpler, getting a free homepage from Google Sites and learning HTML and CSS?

An old second-hand laptop running Linux would be about as cheap, more portable and more useful than the Pi. The Pi has its uses of course, but it’s not a magic bullet.

I want the Pi to succeed, but I think the idea that its low price point alone will get more kids into programming is misguided.

On March 1st, Google will implement its new, unified privacy policy, which will affect data Google has collected on you prior to March 1st as well as data it collects on you in the future. Until now, your Google Web History (your Google searches and sites visited) was cordoned off from Google’s other products. This protection was especially important because search data can reveal particularly sensitive information about you, including facts about your location, interests, age, sexual orientation, religion, health concerns, and more. If you want to keep Google from combining your Web History with the data they have gathered about you in their other products, such as YouTube or Google Plus, you may want to remove all items from your Web History and stop your Web History from being recorded in the future.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/02/how-remove-your-google-search-history-googles-new-privacy-policy-takes-effect

Sending your password in human-readable form is bad enough if emails are lost or intercepted, but it also indicates that they’re probably not encrypting the passwords in their database.

This way, if they ever get hacked an attacker will be able to read the passwords of all the users and try them against other accounts they may own.

Spectrum Interactive, please read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_(cryptography)

We have discovered that our TicketWeb UK direct email marketing system was exposed to unauthorised access. As a result, you may have received up to four emails on Saturday, February the 11th, from an unauthorised party.

The email in question posed as an Adobe newsletter, but linked to a phishing scam. The email goes on:

We have taken immediate action to close the vulnerability. You can rest assured that none of your credit card information was vulnerable during this attack.

It’s not clear if the database was extracted and then used, or if access to their legitimate email systems was gained illegitimately and a scam sent.

It might sound like the most pedantic obsession over minutae, but stuff like this matters.

It matters not just for us user experience people who pore over every detail, but for ‘regular users’ who are forced to approach interface after interface: re-learning the basics over and over because of design decisions made without proper thought.

Here’s the new icon:

Internet Explorer hasn’t had a ‘plus’ icon for years, but it’s part of the tab bar. In Firefox it’s tab-shaped and features a ‘plus’ symbol. The new button in Chrome is a different shape, location and colour to the tabs – how would a first-time user know that this opens a new tab? Even if they work it out, it’s an extra level of cognitive stress that should be totally unnecessary for the user.

If you’re interested in reading more about how complete novices use software, this is a fascinating read, from Jennifer Morrow’s blog:

I find Joe, a 60-year-old hospital cafeteria employee, in the food court looking suitably bored out of his mind. Joe agrees to do a user test, so I begin by asking my standard demographics questions about his experience with the internet. Joe tells me he’a never used a computer, and my eyes light up.

http://jboriss.wordpress.com/2011/07/06/user-testing-in-the-wild-joes-first-computer-encounter/

In the US, we have mandatory “Nutrition Facts” on food labels, couldn’t we implement something similar to convey age, privacy, affiliation, and payment terms for a site or service? Privacy issues are already hard to track and it isn’t getting any easier.

Here’s a startup idea for someone: Parse a website’s TOS to summarize in an easy-to-understand format.

http://clearsignal.posterous.com/do-we-value-our-laundry-more-than-our-privacy