A free National Rail interface that let me recreate their journey planner. It’s not that their journey planner isn’t good, it’d just be cool to integrate it’s services into my own services.

Websites for events could have a feature that tells customers what the best train (specifically) would be to get to the event. Not just “Get off at Kings Cross station”, but “Get the train that arrives at 13:23 at Kings Cross”. The API could even let the provider book and order train tickets for the customer.

My calendar could automatically update times for services changes or cancellations.

I probably won’t be able to do this one myself. But it’s a cool idea.

I’m not sure any of these exist. A story centric RPG that I can play in my web browser that isn’t based on Flash. Final Fantasy or Dragon Age in your browser, or even on your iPhone.

I don’t mean an MMO. Whilst it could be interesting to see that, what I really want is one storyline (maybe with the occasional sub-quests, a la Fallout 3) that I can play through and ultimately complete the game. Then I can start it over again if  like. Or not, doesn’t really matter.

I’d like actual save game files, so I can save at one point and load it again. Something that we do with PC games and console games all the time but I’ve never seen on a web based game.

The pluses for web based games are that they’re cross platform (baring a hack or two to get the Javascript to work in IE, or whatever), and run on almost every machine in existence. Nothing more to download or install whilst you’re at work on a school computer (don’t play games at school, kids).

I barely ever watch TV on TV on any more. It’s usually downloaded from somewhere, or streamed. Usually not the same source from episode to episode. That leads to a problem in that you don’t know what episode you’re on any more. My StageVu history says I’ve watched up to episode six, but I might have watched a few episode on 4oD, or watched on actually on TV.

So, I need another service that lets me keep a log of what episode I’ve watched up to. I guess somewhat manual at first, but I don’t see why there can’t be plugins to see what you’re watching and then update the site (a Firefox plugin for websites, VLC plugin for downloaded shows). Some things would have to be manual, but you could text in to the site saying what you’re watching and it could update.

Another problem I have with TV is when I’m watching a series that isn’t out in the UK yet. So there’s no media telling me that there’s a new episode of House. I usually find out at least a few days later than I could have watched it from a friend, or from being spoiled online.

It’d be nice to have a global TV guide that told me when new episodes are released.

This is an idea I’ve had for a while, which I’ve just never gotten around to doing anything about and the Apple’s iPad made me think about it again.

Essentially it’s a new aggregation tool (because I have a love affair with a lot of topical news on one page) but takes the news from a lot of sources. Twitter especially: taking local trending topics and correlating them pragmatically with articles from other places. Reddit, for the comments. BBC for the information. Guardian and a few other online news places for more opinionated pieces. And maybe even finding independent WordPress.com blogs that are talking about the news item.

It wouldn’t be just listing links to various stories, the articles would all be related to each other for that topic.

With a touch screen (which is why the iPad made me think of this again) it would be a simple app that I could just leave running and occasionally click a few things. Without a touch screen it could just be like a news ticker showing snippets from various sources. I’d show a mock up of how I imagine it, but I’m terrible at designing things so it would look horrendous.

It’s the first of February, and since humans love to add meaning to arbitrary days, I’ve decided to start a project today. Each weekday I plan on updating my blog (it needs the attention, after all) with an idea for a web app that I’ve had. The idea doesn’t have to be amazing, nor original. It could be a new application, or a change to another web service out there. It doesn’t have to be a full proposal, just an idea fleshed out enough to show what I think could be done with it, and why it’s interesting.

Then, at the weekend I could be spending on one of the more interesting ones and hopefully release at least a working version by Monday. I’ll push all the code to my github as open source projects, so if someone likes something I’ve started they can happily fork it.

This’ll do a number of things that I think will be helpful for me.

It’ll force me to be creative; to constantly be thinking up different (maybe not even better) ways to do things. Being innovative isn’t about doing everything someone does, just better. Being innovative is doing something new. I’m not saying I’ll be creative, just different.

I want to use a different language to PHP too. I know PHP, and maybe a little too well. Like the partner you’ve been with for a few months now, and everything’s fine, you just feel you need something different. I want to randomly pick another language to learn. In fact, why do these apps have to be web-based? Maybe I can throw in a few client based apps.

Even if I don’t do anything with the idea, maybe someone else will and if that makes the internet a better place then I suppose I’ve still been successful.

It’ll also just give me something to do to kill time. I have a fair bit of it.