A while back I announced I was going to create 2 new online apps. I’m about 80% done with the first one. I started on it last week and have been working on it every once in a while. It’s a rather small app, but it’ll have some features which I think people will like – well, at least one person should, since it’s based off their request. It should be ready next weekend.

The other app, which I’ll reveal in the list below as #3, I’ve decided not to write. After thinking a bit, I decided it was the kind of application that would be cool to write, but that no one would have any practical use for. These kind of ideas come to me every once in a while, most of the time I come to my senses, though sometimes I actually end up implementing them and releasing them to the public (my Mini-Hex Editor comes to mind). Below is a list of four ideas I’ve had that I seriously considered and than later realized were ridiculous. If you happen to think any of them are not-so-ridiculous, feel free to take the idea and implement it.

1) Online Texture Synthesizer

Texture Synthesis is the process of taking in a texture and then outputting a much larger version of that texture. Usually, you want to minimize repeatability, so the texture seems more real, so you try to “learn” the texture and grow it out into a larger area. Below is an example. Texture A is inputted, and texture B is outputted.

Pretty cool, right? Texture Synthesis is the kind of thing you learn in grad school. It’s one of those weird topics that advisors try and push on their students since it’s apparently a ripening area with lots of creative solutions that people can publish papers on. My advisor had me learn all about texture synthesis. So naturally, as I was pondering possible apps to make, I thought to myself “Hey, why not make an online texture synthesizer!” It seemed like an intriguing idea at first. There are lots of algorithms to chose from, and I had already implemented a few of them for graphics projects I had to do. But then it occurred to me: What would anyone want with a texture synthesizer? Seriously. It’s a neat problem, but outside of a few far out purposes, there’s really no reason anyone would need such a program, at least your average person. And I’m sure people who would like a texture synthesizer would probably be more likely to build their own engine for it than to use some program some guy posted up on his website. So the idea was scrapped. It’s a neat problem though.

2) Moving Window Art Generator

A few years ago, while in daze of bordem at work, I suddenly had this weird idea of creating layered moving graphics. Only the graphics didn’t move, just the holes between them. I thought the idea was so cool that when I got home I whipped up a program to create the image stills and then I used a gif creator to make the gifs. Below are two such gifs I created:

I should say there is NO POLITICAL meaning behind the Pat/Bush picture. I just thought it was trippy looking. I made a few other various designs. Mostly people thought they were weird. Though I did have one Visual Arts major think they were really cool, which made my day. I thought about writing a polished version of the program that would fully create the gifs, but then I realized that no one had asked for such a program, and outside of a few friends, most people thought the images were really bizarre. Actually, if I get really really bored, I may one day re-write an app for this. But at the moment I have much more useful things on my plate.

3) Online Magic Eye TAAG Program

You’ve heard of Magic Eye pictures, haven’t you? Those neat little images where when you unfocus your eyes a 3D image appears? Well it turns out those things are actually called autostereograms and the wikipedia article on them explains the algorithm for how they are created:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autostereogram

I thought that article was really fascinating. So much so that I thought about creating a Magic Eye generator, but then decided that the Magic Eye people might not look too favorably on that. But then I found this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Image_Random_Text_Stereogram

ASCII Art autostereograms, and I thought “hey, I’ve just written a program for creating large ASCII Art text, why not make a program that lets you see them in 3D!” I figured it’d be something that people would get a real kick out of. However, only the “Banner” font would work, since the generated ASCII images would not have the characters from the fonts pop up, but the areas of space that those characters took up pop out.

However, after giving this some good thought I came back to what had stopped me from creating apps #1 and #2: Would anyone ever have any practical use for this?

It might be fun to use once or twice, but I couldn’t see anyone using it more than that. And I couldn’t think up any situations where someone would actually use the app for something – other than maybe making generating some 3D text to show someone for the sake of showing them something they hadn’t seen before. That’s not really the kind of app I want to make. Plus it’d be a lot of hard work for something that would get such little use. And what if the Magic Eye people made one that generated pictures and not text? That would be so much cooler.

Anyway, that’s a sampling of apps I seriously considered and then later ditched. Hopefully you’ve found them somewhat interesting. Talking about them makes me feel less bad about spending so much time thinking about them.