[Windows Mobile Development and Hacking General] SeanFromSoCal:
Chad, welcome back. We all missed you and your wonderful work. And no matter what endeavor you decide to partake in we will blessed and very grateful for your time and effort.

I'm sure us XDA-ers would like to know your vision for each pathway. Here are some of my thoughts though:

Continue Pocket Melody

For continuing Pocket Melody development, A_C's S2P covers a lot of what I remember from your threads that you and others wanted in Pocket Melody and an iPhone inspired media player. If you go down this road what vision did you have that will distinguish Melody from A_C's?

Picture Viewer

With the Picture Viewer, you have A_C's S2V and the HTC Album. A_C's is simple, very finger friendly and fast. HTC Album has some more advanced gesture support but this also adds in the complexity and sometimes I just can't get the gesture I want. A_C's has clear seperation making it the winner in my eye.

Yet I still think that there could be a need for another picture viewer application of a different style. I still have your Picture Flow beta on my Wizard, just for the effect that it had. Maybe you can continue development on that? Or Maybe you could make one that looks like a real photo album with a page flip effect? 3D style like the Diamond?

On a tangent, maybe a Theme Viewer/Manager might be a good related project. I'm using Pocket Theme Manager v2.0 which is like a 3 year old program, but nothing else is available out there to replace it. It reads the TSK files and caches a JPG thumbnail so once everything is cached it runs pretty fast. Just not finger friendly in comparison to a bunch of the other applications I have installed. Nice to have a quick way to view and change a TSK. The built-in Today Setting control panel definately isn't up to the task.

New GUI Concept

This would be great. No one will ever be happy be happy with our current WM5/WM6/WM6.1 so any improvement in finger friendliness, less clicking, etc...anything to make Windows Mobile to be as easy to use as a regular non-PPC cellphone.

What I would LOVE to see is to cut the top start/title bar in half and have a top bar and bottom bar underneath the softkeys. On the top it will include the normal start button, signal bar, battery, clock, close button. All these will be clickable and function just like the regular top bar. The bottom bar will have an expand arrow/triangle (like PointUI had at the bottom) and when you click on the arrow/triangle it will slide up and give you a floating (maybe semi-transparent) ribbon. This ribbon can contain a program launcher, today plug-ins, whatever. It could just slide up and then have pages you can flip or be able to spin like Yahoo Go!. With this setup you aren't using any more today screen real estate and yet you always have one click access to whatever is on the bottom ribbon. No need to get back to the today screen to see your launcher/today plugins.

Contact Manager

PocketCM is pretty great in my point of view. Skinnable, built-in SMS threader, field editor, filters, favorites, and more. I couldn't think of anything else I would need in a contact manager. And you have a lot of others out there to fulfill the needs of others. Even iContact is back in development. =)

Other

And now for the other category. I just see you and A_C as XDA's finger friendly innovators. I would hate for you guys to utilize your talents in overlapping apps. Then we'll have two great applications from two great developers and then...we'd have to choose. DON'T MAKE US CHOOSE! :P

So what I recommend is that you push the limits. Do something way out there. You did that with your coverflow and it inspired a lot of others developers. And in some way I believe helped bump up the quality level of applications we see from XDA members.

Best of luck in whatever you choose. And once again we are all very thankful.