Ideas that are more fun than practical or business-oriented. Mostly purely fun though.
The iPhone uses a regular number PIN-code as a locking mechanism for the phone. Android uses a swipe-based method.
Wouldn’t it be funny to use shake instead? Think of your favourite chorus in a song, and shake to it. Someone would have to guess the correct song and “dig” to it as you do.
Sure everyone can see you shaking and shaking takes more effort than swiping, but it would be funny!
As a former tab-junkie I owe most of my rehabilitation to Read It Later. I had a habit of leaving interesting articles open in new tabs, because if I put them in bookmarks it would just grow into a mess. Shortly after I bought my Amazon Kindle I started to look into how I could get those articles into it. I found Instapaper, which could have online articles sent to my Kindle on a daily basis. But that wasn’t the revelation I hoped for.
The popularity of “status updates” on social media sites proves that people like to tell other people what they’re up to. The idea would be to have a personal calendar public just to show off what an interesting life you have. I call it the Bragendar (bragging + calendar).
Show people that you’re so busy, that your friends have to book you two weeks in advance to meed you. The further into the future you’re booked, the more points you get.
Not the planing type? Then show how spontaneous you are by “checking-in” in places just like you usually do, but have Bragendar generate a calendar of stuff you’ve done without planning.
It would be a fun chaotic-lawful points division to see who of your friends are the planing type and who are the spontaneous. Then comparing yourself to how much action you’re getting in your life with your approach.
Playing around with Google Web Toolkit for a hobby project (secret!) I had to get some dates and Java being Java I couldn’t just use Date, I had to use Calendar. Since Calendar is an interface (ofc) I had to use the GregorianCalendar.
It would be funny to implement a MayanCalendar that just throws NullPointExceptions if you try to get dates after 2012!
With so many products that are real but you’d swear it was a joke it would be fun to make a real working Visual Studio or <enter your fav-IDE here> plugin that removes all whitespaces on save, to “save time when compiling”. The Pro version would only remove the unnecessary whitespaces. 😉 Then back it up with real hard data on how much faster it becomes (something like “Compile your code 0.0000000000000000000001% times faster!”). Any money made through this product should be donated to a charity, like Child’s Play.
In Swedish it’s pretty common to mix in English terms. I guess a lot of languages does this, with mixed results.
I remember an old site called Smurfalizer where you’d enter a webadress and it would take you to the site but replace a bunch of words with “smurf”. It would be funny with a site that’d replace Swedish some words with English, basically turning the site into “Swenglish”. Like saying “email” instead of “epost”.
Update 2011-01-26: It would be fun to do it the other way around too. Translate Swenglish into proper Swedish, like “pipeline” (as in “det ligger i pipelinen”) to “rörledning”.
One of the greatest gaming inventions of recent time is Achievements, IMHO. Wikipedia describes it as “a meta-goal defined outside of a game’s parameters”.
My friend Karl showed me the git achievements project. You are awarded “Achievements” based on what you do in the version control system. Some examples:
“Apprentice Seamstress: amended a commit with git-commit –amend.”
“Apprentice Socialite: pushed a branch to a remote repository using git-push”
“Apprentice Stone Mason: Added files to the index area for inclusion in the next commit with git-add”
That’s a great idea! It can be used to incourage best practices and company policies. It could even teaching fundamentals of version control management in a fun way.
I do prefer SVN though, and there can probably be some money made on MS Team Foundation Service.
The achievements of each employee could be shown in the company intranet, or even on it’s public website.
