IdeaFactory

Inspiration

The idea came during one of the developers' Interactive Narrative for Video Games course, where the students played a game of "STOP" to fill columns with words. These columns represented elements of a story or idea, and the point was to select a single word from each group and then combine all these words to come up with something new and interesting.

This app is based on that concept, automating and randomizing the word-selection process to offer a simple, quick, and fun way to find new ideas.

What it does

In its simplest form, IdeaFactory gives the user the power to create word groups, add words to these groups, and then request the app to randomly select one word of each desired group, and present the results in a collection. The user can then utilize these results as prompts to aid them in their brainstorming process.

IdeaFactory is made as flexible as possible, hoping that users from all backgrounds will find a use for it. It is simply as powerful as you make it.

How we built it

IdeaFactory's prototype is built using the ionic framework (angular.js + cordova), with Parse assisting in the back-end.

Challenges we ran into

We both learned Parse in the process, and the learning curve was a little steeper than we expected.

Most of the bugs were due to inexperience with the concept of "promises" at the time of retrieving and presenting live data in an asynchronous environment (JavaScript).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting to the end of the hackathon and being able to present the project!

What we learned

We learned to use Parse, and attained a better understanding of the concept of "promises."

We also learned to work on a prototype and prioritize features and tasks under such a constrained amount of time.

What's next for IdeaFactory

IdeaFactory will be polished and optimized, both internally and aesthetically, to offer more functionality, and other brainstorming utilities/techniques. The app will be released for free for Android, iOS, and hopefully Windows Phone users as well, within the next few months. A release date is yet to be discussed.

Confirmed new features for future releases are:

• More options:
  • Assign images to words, for context
  • Add notes about words, for context
  • Group saved collections into projects

Built With

• angular.js
• ionic
• parse