The Brainstormer -- creativity booster with neat design | Hacker News Reader

The Brainstormer -- creativity booster with neat design

andrewbosley.com

6 pointsjoeld426 comments

Nice! If you don't know about the history of such random phrase generators using dials (and if you haven't read about them in Eco's The Island of the Day Before), spend 10 minutes reading Ramon Llull'ls life (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramon_Llull) and his Ars generalis ultima.

"At the age of 82, in 1314, Raymond traveled again to North Africa and an angry crowd of Muslims stoned him in the city of Bougie or Béjaïa in present-day northern Algeria. Genoese merchants took him back to Mallorca where he died at home in Palma the next year. It is said that before evangelizing he would openly denounce Islam in areas dominated by Islam."

Interesting guy ideed!

Thats neat, thanks for the link.

I knew that there was plenty of historical precedent for this kind of thing, but I hadn't heard of Llull before. That's really neat that he also used concentric dials. But I doubt his wheels had Twitter integration, hehehhh..

I'm a writer and an iPhone dev, and I found the original version of this to be very useful, so I worked with Andrew to build a version for iPhone. I'd love to hear feedback from HN folks about this app, and any tips to help promote it.

Also, more info, screenshots, etc http://www.tapnik.com/brainstormer

First update is going to be support for iPad, any other ideas for features or things that could be useful to you?

Thanks! Joel

I like the look and feel of this product. I wish I could input a word where it says "Random", then press enter and have that affect the output in some way. To me, an interactive feature would add more WOW Factor to the product.

The iphone version is a bit more interactive in that you can edit the list of words. Is that what you mean?

And since the iphone has touch input, you can spin the wheels with your fingers, they have some inertia and keep going for a bit. The flash one doesn't have any inertia when you are dragging.

Actually I was thinking about a text input box with a spin button below it. The input text would give a clue to the innermost wheel as to what universe of random words to choose from. For instance inputing Blue might produce berries, bird, feelings, ect., vs stop sign or school bus on the inner wheel. It seems like it would be more interesting to "play with" when someone is bored too, which could translate into more sales.

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