Problem: There is written telephone number. It can be written on a wall, or a web page on your screen.
Solution: An app that can OCR a photograph and find telephone numbers and then open the phone to allow the user to call. I have done similar through Google lens – but that included lots of tapping and swiping. This solution is 1 app that is stream line for this.
Often when you create a calender entry everything goes the way you planned. But sometimes the event ends up on the wrong date. If you don’t happen to remember exactly the erroneous date you entered you have no way to find it again.
Alas – let the calendar have a way to show the last entries so you can find it there.
When the TV ads start the sound volume is raised. Until the TV channels figure out that is a bad idea I have a suggestion.
Connect a box to the HDMI cable and recognise when commercials a are on; typically the TV channel’s logo is gone.
Now cut the sound. Either by cutting the sound in the cable or by sending remote control signals.
The connected box can be exchanged for a camera.
Odds are you are holding both a box and a camera in your hand right now; a cellular phone.
Point the camera at the TV and let a an app recognise the commercial. The phone talks to a remote control.
For taking notes, paper and pen beats any computer. But taking backups of paper notes is a task. Not a difficult task or a task that takes long time but still a task taking long enough to never be done.
So let’s give some incitament.
First let the cellular take care of backing up. Everyone nowadays, at least anyone that should be interested in this idea, has a cellular with a camera good enough for taking a recognisable photo of a sheet of paper.
Ordinary photo copier paper is quite good for writing so let’s use that. It is cheap and the copying machine is already stuffed with it.
Print a paper with a QR code in two corners. Let this QR code have some info in it that is identifiable by an app (or system). Say it contains a consecutive Number for Your id. Print 30 of them the first of the month and stick in your binder. If you are on a note taking spree, print some more. The app just makes up new, recognisable, QR codes. The QR codes also makes it easier for the app to recognise the corners of the paper sheet so you don’t have to be so thorough when photographing the paper.
Take a photograph of it with you cellular and the app and wham bam it gets backuped. The time line is known. If you go back and edit an older paper, take a photo and it is backup’ed in complement to the older backup.
Put in some OCR and maybe maybe your handwriting can be recognised.
Put in some simple boxes to tick the date or some icons to mark for different meanings. “Backup secretly, I will destroy this original paper.”, “Send as email attachment to myself”, “Send as email link to Ms Moneypenny.”, “Store in personal stack”, “Store in office stack.”
While we’re at it. Print your name and number on every sheet. Print some light grey markings so you can draw right angles. Print heavier black lines on the backside. These will shine through when writing but not when photo copying or backing up with the cellular camera.
My kitchen mixer has 3 buttons, 2 dials and a simple display. It can do some stuff, like cook for a certain number of minutes or beat at a certain speed. Simply put, it can do one thing and then has to be set to do another thing.
Why is it not programmable? Why can’t I set it to kneed and heat the dough 4 hours before I rise in the morning?
To be honest, I would not want it to have a user interface to solve all the situations I would come up with since I have seen how bad it is when hardware people try to solve a programming problem. Just look at your car, how much did you pay for the navigator that is both clunky and out of date compared to the google maps you have on your phone? Or think of the kids’ toy that started as a wifi connected state-of-the-art thing to play with but ended as a hacker’s dream with an attached camera.
So instead let all the motors and servos in the machine have a well known (bluetooth) interface. Then connect your phone or have a cheap android phone attached to the machine with for instance magnets. Cheap. Easy replacable. Updatable.
Now your Kenwood mixer can kneed and let the dough rise and the Siemens oven can be started in time for your Electrolux coffee brewer aroma accelerated wake up. These three slow turning kitchen appliance giants don’t have to learn how to cooperate but you can teach their stuff to do.
Your phone is typically set to lock its screen after a minute or so of not touching it.
This is really a problem when trying to follow a recipe.
Why not write an app that complements the Flight mode, Movie mode, Meeting mode and Whatnot modes there are, with a Recipe mode.
This Recipe mode, in its simplest solution would just turn of locking and turning off the screen. In a more advanced solution it would lock the screen but let the web page with the recipe still be on and scrollable.
Say you and your spouse is shopping food together. You are both running in the same store and looking for the same goods. You have to check in with each other often to sync what each have taken and what you should continue with.
Instead there could be an app, or simple web site, that does the syncing.
Let’s say you have a shopping list stored in your phone. You give it, or you are given, a unique id. Give this code to your spouse.
As soon as you check any item on the list a signal is sent to the other phone, directly or over internet, to check the item on other phones using the same code.
That way you can go shopping together without having to go back and forth to the shopping cart to discuss.
Extra bells and whistles could be the ability to send small messages like “double the milk” or “do we have eggs at home?”
What if you have an area suitable for football in the vicinity but not enough friends to play?
Why not have an app where you describe the lawn and level of seriousness to let others join?
Or say you have a team of 6 but want another 6 to play with?
Or you want to play some sports but don’t know where people are playing?
There should be an app for that.
Enter location, time andlevel of seriousness in an app. Other interested in the same area; who feel like playing, get a popup and you all get together and play.
The idea could be extended to the drummer calling in sick at last minute, garage sales, apple picking, sailing crew, swimming company or shopping company.
I saw one at the local lawn. Something football-ish. Nice!
Most shopping apps are a list of text. They typically contain some aids for easily writing gherkin, and cantaloupe and how many but they are still a list from top to bottom.
Most grocery stores have vegetables in a part of the store so when you pick the tomatoes you probably want the corn and the apples at the same time; but not the milk, chocolate or spices.
So I suggest the list reorders itself when you start picking to show what’s nearby.
One can also use the localisation features of the phone to find out which store you are in and adapt even more as it then can know whether bread is in the start of the store or later.
It already exist, Don’t forget the milk, Out of milk and more.
They synchronise nicely and allow the whole family use the same list; very good for updating the shopping list at work for the one at paternal leave at home.
What I miss though is:
I want it to reorder my shopping list to be a pickup list in the same order as in the store. It could sense in which order I ticked off the items and make guesstimates the next time I fill out the list. I don’t know exactly what the algorithm should like. There are different list orders for different shops.
It should change behaviour when I enter the list and when I am in the shop. It could be a switch or it could use geo info and automagically switch.
If it uses geo data it can also differ between different stores and alter the list’s order to the actual shop.
Ok, so now the app or html knows where we are and what to shop. Time to get offers and alternatives. The shop has offers, the suppliers might have offers, there might be third parties with offers, neighbouring shops might have offers. Download and show.