Trying to come up with new app ideas for the iPhone, or iPad is not easy, as there are now nearly three-quarters of a million of them (750,000). But the other day I spent a number of hours with a very wise App entrepreneur, and his company alone has produced nearly 1200 apps, and that’s a lot of apps my friend – as we began talking he brought in several kids, I say kids because they are in their early 20s and we began brain storming. Since I was leading this mission, I asked everyone to write down all the things they had done or been involved with, each area of expertise or hobby with a number by it.
Each person wrote down about a dozen items and then we went through them to see if there were any duplications, and it turns out each of us had some writing experience. I said; Okay let’s talk about apps to help writers do their job better. I indicated the need to increase vocabulary to come up with better or more appropriate words as needed. Another said they needed all the quotes available at their finger tips, but while they were writing they didn’t want to stop, they just wished to keep typing.
Okay so, how about a speech recognition app where a writer would say: “Quotes about _ _ _.” And the app would speak back the most famous quotes in that venue. Indeed, I then asked if they could make a “Thesaurus App” where by the write could say a word and the Thesaurus App would just speak back all the similar words, as the writer heard on they liked they could type it into their article, creative story, or email. They all agreed this would be easy to create, and then said they’d go and check to see if anyone had already made one yet.
It turned out there is one and just as you might suspect it is called the Thesaurus App 1.0 and it costs $.99 to load. The software app creator is Piet Jonas and in the description it states; “Retrieve the synonym for every word. If available you will get antonyms, related terms, similar word, and user suggestions too. Tap one of the results to start a quick new search for that term. It keeps a history list of your search terms as well.”
This app has received high ratings, but needs to be voice enabled, so perhaps my friends company may do that, or maybe you should, as this was just a brain storming session to warm up, and they’ve already got some 500 apps to create before they ever get down the list to this one. Please consider all this.