Chapter Five: False Faces (or: There Isn't an App For That)

Based on an exercise outlined in the book "Thinkertoys"

I was pondering the potential problems I currently face and couldn't really find any I felt like pontificating upon at the moment. Therefore I am going to examine a theoretical challenge, which I have mulled over on occasion: "What sort of application would I create for the iPhone marketplace?"

There are a few presuppositions I would make about an iPhone application. An application has to appeal to a wide audience; it has to have a unique function; and it has to be self-contained.

If I reverse the basic framework of my application, I can explore less conventional methods of solving this challenge. Reversing each of these assumptions yields: an application does not have to appeal to a wide audience; it does not have to have a unique function; and it does not have to be self-contained.

So what sort of application fits within these reversed parameters? For the first assumption, my application could be specifically designed to appeal to a particular subset of users, or could fall under the "experimental" label where it is not designed for any particular audience at all. What sort of experimental application would not by default emphasize a unique selling point? To determine that, I'll first examine what an application not being self-contained could mean.

Increasingly, computer applications are being connected to external services like Facebook and Twitter. Mobile applications are starting to follow suit, meaning that a simple Facebook integration wouldn't be enough to differentiate my application. I thought about this, considering an application that leveraged email in some way to communicate data, but ultimately decided the best and simplest way to do this would be the application connecting to the same application.

Right now I have an experimental application that works by connecting to other users of the same application, that does not use a completely original paradigm. I thought about what sort of experiences I could re-badge that would benefit from user-to-user connection, and, ironically enough, the first thing that came to mind was a brainstorming application. There are already applications that connect random users for short conversations; the trick is in the delivery.

In my theoretical application, which I have creatively dubbed "Community Brainstorming" for now, users will pen the beginning of an idea and send it randomly to another user, who will expand upon this idea and pass it along to another user. Users can track the progress of their idea as it is randomly expanded upon, and receive idea lists of others to add their own comments to. Idea chains will be ended after a certain number of responses, or whenever the user decides to manually terminate them. There will be profanity filters to compensate for inevitable trolling, and users can manually flag offensive links in their idea chain.

Excellent! Just like that I have a quality application which will surely make me millions of "Free," because I can't imagine releasing an application like that for any higher price (unless it takes off and becomes the Next Big Thing, of course, at which point I would cash in immediately).

Now I just need to get my developer's license, and find a Mac to program my application, and figure out how to program applications for the iPhone. Should be simple enough.




Closing thoughts on this exercise:

I was pretty skeptical about this one, mostly because I couldn't really think of anything that seemed suited for this sort of examination, but I think it actually turned out alright. I arrived at a conclusion I was happy at, anyway, even if it did take quite a lot of rumination.

A short note about my creative environment:

I typed this over the course of an hour and a half or so, starting at about eight o'clock, while sprawled in my bed under the comforter (it'd a little chilly in the room). It's too late at night for any sort of sunlight, so all of my light is coming from the bright room light that shines directly at my bed. My roommate has his TV on, and is clicking away at some sort of game, occasionally making some sort of comment to his teammates through his headset.