There are many small apps that I wish I had, here’s a short list of the ones that come to mind at the moment:

A process monitor that shows the top consumer.

I often tack my system(s) to the max, and therefore run out of cycles frequently. While this is sometimes the result of batch computations that I’ve planed in advance, it is pretty common that I’ll just be working away and all of a sudden things shudder to a halt. When this happens I want to know two things: 1. Is it processor-related, or is it memory-related, and; 2. What application is responsible? Processor / memory monitors are a dime a dozen, but they are typically very small (showing only the usage, like gkrellm) or very large (showing all the applications in the top 20 or so, like top). I can’t stand having top visible all the time, and it takes to long to get to a terminal and start up a monitor. By definition my system is not very responsive, and I never see what’s causing the slowdown.

I need a small process and/or memory monitor that shows the top-using application in a tooltip, or optionally in an automatic pop-up when the usage hits a certain level.

Universal acronym definitions.

Highlight an acronym, hit a keystroke, and see a list of the most common expansions of that acronym based on frequency of use.

A calendar dock-app where the date on the dock icon is actually accurate.

Yeah, I actually want to look at my system bar-thingy and see what day it is, not some random number between 1 and 31 that the icon developer thought represented calendars.

Hovering over the icon shows the full time/date, which is configurable from an entry on the icon’s context menu. I don’t care what happens when I click on the icon, as long as I can make it do something arbitrary ;).

The ability to refactor and generate source code from the command line.

MetaJava (http://wiki.ciscavate.org/index.php/MetaJava) could resolve this issue for one language, but I’d hate to stop there. A tool like this would mean amazing things for small-time development environments and text-editor lovers. (Emacs and vi would easily eclipse some other IDEs IMHO ;).

The idea is that you could easily create mini applications that read in specifications in some simple format and produce boilerplate for your required language, and/or move classes, rename variables / methods / packages / etc. without dedicating half your memory to an IDE that will then want to write 500 mb to swap, since all my memory is taken up by an application I have to run because….

I don’t have a web browser that doesn’t suck.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident.”

…and a web development environment to go with it.

That’s a start. I’ll add more as they occur to me.