saruman

i was looking at old code monkey posts. i was wondering if you ever came up with a product to work on for the three of you thinking about starting a company.

i've got a handful of ideas that i'd love to share with someone that would actually see them thru to production.

let me know.

my ex-gf and i always talked about building a closet organiser app. think iTunes for your clothes. it would allowing you to look thru groups of clothes. or kinds of clothes: pants, shirts, purses, et al. then instead of getting to to a song file and and playing it, you'd get to a picture of an article of clothing. then iCloset (or whatever it'd be called) would provide suggestions as to matching articles.

so if you said i wanna wear this pink 3/4 length sleeve sweater, it'd suggest a group of bottoms you could wear with it (pants, skirts, whatever) based on two things. 1. what matches it using a series of complex matching rules that i'll explain further later. and 2. the user's criteria for what kind of day s/he has (work, casual, cold, any combination of things).

the matching would be done using a prebuilit matching system builit in, but would allow users to create their own rules. like if they think that it's ok to wear navy blue and black, well, ok whatever. and when entering a new article of clothing the user would enter a set of meta data about each one. color, size, warmth, any items that definitiely match it to ensure that they'll be marked as matching, formality of the article, lots of stuff. as well as a picture.

it would be infinitely more interesting if you could connect to the outside world making it more usable. for example, when i bought a new shirt at the gap (i would never, but just for example) i could "enter a new item" and navigate to the page for that shirt on the gap site. then iCloset would grab as much data from that page as possible. or at least the picture. parsing dictionaries would have to be written for specific sites until they start publishing an api. the biggest amount of work for the user would be if they had to photograph all their clothes. so even just getting the photo off the web would help considerably.

also, if you could hook into online clothing stores to find that "perfect skirt for this shirt" that'd be really hot. that not a v1 feature. partnerships with clothing companies would be really cool. it'd require some serious data scraping, them publshing some xml or a webservice. it could prolly even done from an rss feed if done right. but that'd be kind of hacktackular. imagine if you could buy clothes right from within this thing from a number of different stores.

i've thought through a lot of this. it wouldn't be so much of a unix app. but i think if you wanna do unix dev, you should do mac os x development. users are super loyal. the indie dev community is really tight and strong. the dev tools are free and good. the cocoa framework is beautiful to develop in.

some other features would be: like "smart outfits" that are created based a set of provided rules and dynamically update. some sort of "my wardrobe" sharing. letting others see what you've got. maybe a way selling/trading clothes with others. calendar planning / tracking. (ie. i want to wear this outfit on friday 4 days from now, so it wouldn't suggest any of those pieces between now and then. and i wore this outfit today. so it would knock it down further in the rotation for a while. both based on user prefs.)

i've got more ideas about this.
i also have more ideas for other apps.

some are bigger than others, some are just little specific utilites. like an iTunes couple's playlist generator. it would work like this. i have a playlist. my gf has a playlist. we both wanna listen to music. the compromise would be switching back and forth. this thing would generate a playlist that would go 3 mine, 3 hers, 3 mine, 3 hers. the number of each would be user definable. or just random.

but i think this closet thing would be awesome to work on. it really just an app that does data aggregation and relationships using complex rule sets. you could use the bsd db for internal data storage, combined with a good deal of xml. i should stop now.

let me know what you think.