

The Brainstormer -- creativity booster with neat design - joeld42
http://andrewbosley.com/the-brainstormer.html

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Jun8
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!

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joeld42
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..

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joeld42
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

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Scott_MacGregor
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.

~~~
joeld42
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.

~~~
Scott_MacGregor
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.

