Filtering great ideas to fit my available time (and budget)
I’m an avid “Idea Man”. I love coming up with new ideas; for iPhone apps, for web apps, and even for real-world inventions. Most of my ideas only sound great in my head, but when I open my mouth the idea seems to turn sour. A smaller number of ideas manage to survive the thought-to-word boundary. An even smaller minority of those ideas manage to make it down onto my “Idea Book” that I use to keep track of all the potential projects I’m going to work on. Admittedly it’s not so much a single “book” as a collection of binders, scraps of paper, and in some cases 3×5 index cards.
Suffice to say amongst all those ideas, some gems manage to stand out above the rest. A few I’ve actually finished, such as Boomle and myDrumPad. The end product is seldom what I’d planned when I came up with the idea, but either due to time constraints, or the project evolving during the course of its development, things change. Mostly I’m pleased with the end result, but there are some things I wish I had time for. For instance, I’d like to re-implement Boomle using Cocos2D to make the animations smoother, and maybe add some extras such as obstacles, more challenging levels and Game Center integration.
Unfortunately, while I absolutely love myDrumPad, my original plans for it involved the creation of loops and patterns within the app. Once I built it and started playing with it in real-time, as opposed to my ideas jotted down on paper, I discovered that the interface — while easy to use for quickly tapping out beats — doesn’t lend itself easily to creating loops. I could create loops, sure, but my goal was to create an app that could be used in live performances, and sadly the interface just doesn’t lend itself to real-time editing of loops. That’s not to say that I’m unhappy with myDrumPad. Sales are going fairly well, and I have a few more updates planned. I’m still adding additional languages to it using ICanLocalize.com (currently it has native support for English, Korean and French, and Japanese and German are following soon).
One of my constant loves for as long as I have been programming has been music and sound production. And since I’m a rather unconventional thinker, I’d like to try my hand at an unconventional music interface. I like the idea that someone without any knowledge of music notation or performance can learn to use my apps to produce the music they hear in their head, and to express themselves in ways they wouldn’t otherwise be able to.
I’m still formulating an idea in my head, but the loop and patterns features I was planning for myDrumPad are going to be built into a new application instead, with a completely different interface. Like myDrumPad, it will be an experiment to see if producing music in this new UI metaphor will be successful. It’s hard to explain, so I’m going to wait until I have a more accurate prototype to show.
But this app idea doesn’t exist in isolation. In my little book of ideas I have several on-the-go prototypes just itching to get started, but since I still maintain a day job (and will for the foreseeable future) my time is limited to a few hours per day, and weekends. My web-based space game, my photo sharing web application, my sonar-based iPhone utility app…all these ideas are stuck in my head as fantastic ideas I’d love to pursue, if only I had the time.
I’m sure it will be an interesting adventure to see which idea wins out in the end. Do I build a web-based MMOG space game set in an infinitely-scalable universe? Or do I build a Core Audio-based iPhone utility? How do I determine which project has the highest likelihood of succeeding, or at least have the greatest likelihood of being finished in a reasonable time-frame by a single developer?
In an ideal world I’d build all of them. Unfortunately, as an idea man, I think of ideas of varying awesomeness faster than I can build them. As long as I require sleep, I suppose I’ll be stuck in this situation.