Grocery Coupons

INTRO:

Most grocery stores will give coupons and rebates to customers that sign up and scan a card upon check out. The card has a unique ID that helps the grocery store gather statistics about customers to more effectively market new products and predict what things to sell.

IDEA:

Instead of printing off coupons at the end of each purchase, have users check in to a kiosk at the front of store to view coupons available.

There could even be an app that would display a customer's current coupons, and automatically delete expired ones. This would certainly eliminate the heap of outdated coupons that I have currently growing above my microwave.

Personal Dictionary

INTRO:

Most web browsers maintain word lists to detect spelling errors in input boxes. This is referred to as the personal dictionary in Firefox. It is possible, but not easy, to edit this dictionary in Firefox. This is useful for adding abbreviations or other information that the browser would normally interpret as jibberish. However, a list of words does not really stand up to the name dictionary without any attached meanings.

IDEA:

Browsers should offer a way to store a short definition for a word or abbreviation, and then highlight it in some fashion whenever it appears on a web page.

This may sound silly at first, but there must be countless abbreviations that show up in medical and law fields that overlap. While it is certainly easy enough to look the word or abbreviation up again, this is a waste of time and learning potential.

When someone searches for the same term and always navigates through the same web page, they are spending time learning and enforcing their memory of a series of clicks and mouse scrolls that brings up the right definition as well. This is time and effort that could be better spent re-enforcing their memory of the term itself. Check out this rendition of a popular news site, to see what I mean:

Fig. A personal dictionary might appear like a lightbox script

While sites like wikipedia offer a fantastic way to store collective knowledge, it does not currently offer a way to reinforce relevant information. This could be a great way to quickly learn new office lingo or even attach a note or two to a person's name.This could be a great tool to expand and even -gasp- organize a healthy vocabulary.

Guitar Tab Apps

INTRO:

Guitar tabs, often referred to as tablature, are a simplified way to represent music in text. A quick search online will reveal multiple sites that host ludicrous amounts of tabs. As a result of this popularity, there are several web applications for creating tabs online.

While tabs cannot effectively express the same amount of information as standard 'sheet music', they are extremely useful for communicating and recording basic ideas. That is the whole point. Unfortunately the existing web applications don't make it very quick or easy to create a tab.

The main problem is that these applications don't take full advantage of the simplicity of the notation. The time required to enter in a few notes is long enough that it inhibits exploration. It is only reasonable to use them to publish a finished song.

IDEA:

Applications for creating tabs should focus on the early design stage of making music.

I cannot stress how critical is to have the ability to copy and paste. Whether I am changing a chord or couple of notes, it is common for those changes to affect the rest of the song. It should also be possible to organize a collection of notes and chords into sections such as 'verse 1' and 'chorus.

Fig. A possible interface for rearranging chords

I am going to be exploring the new Android and iPod touch SDK's to begin creating such an application. I'll post updates as they come.

BACKGROUND:

You will recognize guitar tabs as seemingly lame ASCII art, but the numbers represent where the musicians fingers should go on the fretboard. They are mostly used for guitar and bass, but there's no reason they couldn't be used for other string instruments as well.