Two more silly ideas
QuickThoughts
Design Reviews…
Often take up a lot of time but really, it's about first impressions. Is that font unreadably small? Who thought it a good idea to put that obscure graphic there?
QuickThoughts to the resque! You can upload a snapshot of your mockup and share the link with those whose opinion matters. They have 30 seconds to look at it and up to two minutes to write down their first impressions which You then use to improve the design.
I've set up a Kohana installation and coded the backbone of it. Now it's just the matter of coding in some usability features and doing something with the appearance of the site. In short, it's the question of exactly how lazy I am. I never seem to finish a project past this stage.
Assoc
Inspired by improv and http://oneword.com/. Basically just some JavaScript to bombard the visitor with random words at a very rapid pace. The words are written with a BIG font, on a green/red background.
The goal of the game is to react to the words by thinking of another word. There is no scoreboard. For example, if the visitor sees the word 'cat' on a green background, he must think of a word associated with cat, like 'dog'. When the background is red, the word must be completely unrelated, like 'spaceshuttle'.
As soon as the word is found, the visitor presses the spacebar and is presented with another challenge.
Feel free to steal the ideas and code it yourself. Just drop a link to the implementation.
Webapp idea: characterize.me
Inspired by http://threewords.me/, I thought it would be a good idea to push the thought a bit further.
The website should look Web 2.0-ish, with a clear and big GUI, AJAX and simple eye-candy. The website let's the user to setup a page where people with the link are presented with a list (grid) of checkboxes with different adjectives (some pre-defined, users can add more to the database). These visitors pick adjectives that, in their opinion, best describe the user whose page they are currently viewing.
The user can later see a summary of the results and optionally publish it.
Keywords: Integration with Facebook, Twitter, clean and simple, minimal page refreshes, minimal time setting up, modern web technologies, pretty GUI
Self Destruct
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This idea has been stuck on my head ever since I saw a certain spy movie. I haven't found any similar software in the Net so far.
An Unix program, ideally in Python, that can be activated with a hotkey. Ideal for spys, superhero sidekicks (Chloe Sullivan!) and any paranoid individual. The main goal is to make the PC unusable very quickly and securely wipe all data.
The first can be achieved by overriding the MBR and disabling all input. The program should achieve the first goal in a matter of seconds. The rest can take some time in the hope that the potential threat doesn't realize the data is being destroyed. It should then proceed to format the harddrives and then start writing them over with random data. 2 passes should be sufficient. The final (3rd) pass should write only 0-s to make the disks appear to be untouched. Finally the PC should shut down/restart.
But how does one wipe the OS while still using it? If the wiper is located on a external media (a bootable thumb drive), the process would be too slow. Imagine the situation: our vigilante get an intruder alert, giving her 30 seconds to flee the premises. And the bad guys find her waiting for the system to reboot so that the wiper program could be activated. Not good.
Any thoughts on how to make this happen are welcome in the comments section.
About The Author
Ando “David” Roots is a college student and a software developer from Kunda, Estonia. Living, working and studying in Tallinn, he hopes to get his bachelor degree from the Estonian Information Technology College on IT Systems Development. 