I've been coding alot of web-stuff all my life, rails lately. And i can always find a website to code, but i'm kind of bored with it. Been taking alot of courses of Java and C lately so i've become a bit interested in desktop application programming.
Problem: I can't for the life of me think of a thing to code for desktop. I just can't think of anything i can code that isn't already out there for download. So what do i do? I need some project suggestions that i can set as a goal.
I would say you should roam through github or some other open source site and find an existing young or old project that you can contribute to. Maybe there is something that is barely off the ground, or maybe there is a mature project that could use some improvement.
I find to complete a project, it needs to be something I am passionate about. I feel you need to find your own project I'm afraid.
There is always the Netflix Prize though!
I would write a ray tracer.
Oops, sorry... you're looking for an original idea. :) Ray tracers are still cool, though, and easy to get started on. Maybe you'll get an idea for a game while you're working on it.
If you could make a Ruby ANSI (and xbin, and idf, and adf...) Editor, I would love you. Because that means you would have written ANSI parsing routines that I can hope you release to the open source community.
... but that is a selfish answer. Oh, and a cross-platform editor would be nice as well (although TundraDraw somewhat takes care of that).
Visit shoooes.net for a UI toolkit that's easy and fun, and then the-shoebox.org to see the kinds of things people are doing with it.