douglasmkelly's posterous

Most people could tell you that I'm not the biggest schemer. I am a bit of a pragmatist when it comes to business. I have been thinking for some time now, however, about creating an iPhone App. I even went out and bought the iPhone under a partial premise of needing to learn more about the phone and (of course) needing a test device. I do love my iPhone, but haven't really gotten into the whole app part. I only have 4 pages worth, and one page is games I never play. I have the preverbial LastFM, Facebook, Epicurious and The Weather Channel. I'm a business man. I'm a designer. I write markup and style documents. I'm not a gamer, and I've only ever done the front-end design for web applications - and one that had a hand-held interface.

This week I've been sitting out waiting for a deer to walk by so I could give him some lead poisoning. The only time that I saw any deer in the woods, was when I was just arriving at the predetermined hunting location and was still putting on my gear ... and they were moving pretty quickly. By the time I finally could pick up my gun, I couldn't get a shot off, except if I'd have wanted to shoot a yearling. Which I didn't. If I'd have arrived 15 minutes earlier, I'd have had a chance on a small 4 point. Or there was a large Doe... but probably have gone for the buck.

Anyway, since I've had a lot of time in the woods, and since it's been relatively warm in MI this November, I can have my fingers out of the gloves and have been playing with the phone. Hours in the warm woods has given me the time to further consider what type of app I should create. I've contemplated one that manages web cams placed strategically in the trees around a hunter, so he/she has “more eyes”. The problem with an app like that is one would only use for 2-4 weeks out of a year, and I'm not going to make much money on that. Especially since I only know 1 hunter with an iPhone – me. So could such an app work for other types of scenarios? There is Turkey Season, and maybe Duck Season, but we're only adding a couple weeks. Those other seasons rely on fooling the birds in to your vicinity and not the chance one would ghostly float through your hunting lanes. There is also the issue of additional work by the app owner: The hunter would have to put up the cams and depending on where they were sitting, take them back down again, when leaving. Batteries would have to enter in... and there's the whole small router/network setup... So I've already killed that idea.

I have a couple friends that are building iPhone Apps. One has good promise. It might seem that I'm in search of a problem and solution.

It is possible that I'll never create an application, but will only be able to design a front end. It would just be nice to be on a team working on an iPhone app. So if any of you 61 of my followers can envision an application or know of someone working on one that could use a designer – write/comment/contact me.