College v2

And now for the dorkiest thing I have ever done…

College students have it rough. With loads of productivity software out there, nothing seems to fit. Sure there’s One Note, and online services like Google Calender, but there is no one app that can integrate our needs in to one package of awesomeness.

Business men have Microsoft Outlook. They can rely on a Blackberry or a Calendar app to handle all of their needs. But college students have weird combinations of daily tasks. I’ve been searching for two years and still have not found a program that does it all. Below is my dream app, and the one app I think would serve all students.

The one application that, if I could code, would make in a second. And dammit, it’s so cool, I’d call it Uber.

The Features

Calendar

Obviously, we all have a class and work schedule that we need to juggle. A simple Calendar client would work wonders. However, if it were made for college it could be split in semesters and tasks could be entered in for semester lengths. It would be great if you could custom set your semester dates and go from there. Or, after entering your school, Uber would automatically import sporting events, semester dates, and school events.

Notes

While stu.dicio.us was pretty cool, it left a lot to be desired. A good note program will allow for drawing, have a built in calculator and a math problem template. Imagine if this was integrated with the calendar where, if you click on a day, the notes you took pop up.

Email

While ideally there would be a full e-mail client that would probably slow the system down. I think just a simple notifier system will do. Something that just lets you enter in some POP3 info and will notify you when you Gmail or school address get mail.

Mobility

We college kids live and die by text messaging. It would be great if you could add items to your calendar and to do list using your phone, so the moment you get an assignment you could have it in the program.

Flexible Document System

The notes system should also have a “Documents tab” were you can scan important papers such as your syllabus to be accessed at any time. Or it would display online documents posted online by your teacher. A spot where you can have shortcuts to the directory where you save your homework would allow you to quickly pull up work by date. The documents would be searchable and tagable.

Recording

I wish I could just pop a microphone into my laptop and have it automatically record the lecture and file it under the date and class specified in the program.

Make coffeeJust kidding. Kinda.

Ultra mega cool things

Collaboration

If Writely can do it, so can Uber. Not full on collaboration, but at least a basic IM client and an ability to edit whats displayed on the other persons “Notes” screen. This can let a whole class edit and take notes in real time as the professor is lecturing.

Transcript

The aforementioned recording should be able to be made into transcripts by a program. Sure it wouldn’t be 100% accurate but Odeo does it.

Can you make it?

I am not a programmer. I don’t know what aspect of this that would be impossible for only few people to tackle. But I see Linux get 100’s of volunteers to put together an awesome operating system. Colleges have the best and brightest computer programmers, so why not a nice college application?

However the most important aspect of this program would be that it is open source, and free. Similar to Firefox, it would allow extensions and themes to be made. It would also fit into the college students budget.

I’m not too familiar with open source and how it works, but several of these aspects already have open source counter parts. Is there at least a way to patch them all together and add duct tape?

Of course most of these elements already exist on their own, but that’s the problem, we need five different programs do do these minor tasks when one could do. Plus, if all of these elements worked together flawlessly, that would save boatloads of time and allow for some organizational GTD type tricks.

Would would you like to see in a “Uber” program?

Could you make one? Please?

I know something like this would take an insane amount of work, but an ambitious kid can hope.

[tags]GTD, program, pragramming, college, application, Firefox, Writely, Odeo, Uber[/tags]