Brainstorming
ICQing with my friend Aaron today about what kind of programming we'd like to do this summer in our Free Time. It was funny because we accidently started brainstorming about a project to help with (get this!) brainstorming!
Anyway, the idea is to have a tiny little program (tiny enough that when you hit a special key mapped by your window manager to launch it that it would appear almost immediately) that will pop up a dialog box for you to type the idea that just popped into your head. The idea would then be stored in an ideas database (personal or shared) to be revisited at another point in time to categorize, rate, sort, delete (if the idea really sucked), expand on, etc. using a seperate (less tiny) program when you had the time.
In the case where a shared database is in use, you can rate or expand on other people's ideas creating a graph of idea nodes (most likely a tree, but I haven't thought about that enough yet).
The goal here is convenience. The amount of time required to pop up the window, enter the idea, close the window, and resume your previous activity must be approximately equal to the time required to enter the data.