"Make something people want"

~Y Combinator

Walking the walk this week, I had my own moment of inventing inspiration along the lines of Y Combinator's credo, true to the old aphorism "necessity is the mother of invention". And it's this mindset I hope to steer kids towards by introducing more than 1 platform within any given animation programming session I teach, that "I wonder how I can use these together, or along with something else to get this to work?" And inventing doesn't have to mean starting out making the next Reddit or Dropbox app (both Y Combinator alums). Nope, it usually starts as simple as the frustration I ran up against, trying to use a tool that just wasn't doing what I needed, remembering,"ah, I know another platform I could try", doing it, still seeing ways to do it better, and hanging on to those solutions to see if I could "make something BETTER that people want". In my case, I was trying out color design apps that big name commercial paint supply business make available on their sites. In this case, importing a custom picture of my home's rooms, then "painting" over sections. And, finding these apps way too glitchy to be much help. Then, I remembered that Scratch's graphic editor let's you do this stuff by letting you import pics as stage "backdrops", so you can bring in multiple room pics as well create color pair swatches (don't forget to use the custom color feature), and then paint them using the rectangle and circle tools. I did find that paint box tool didn't work that well (photo resolution causes issues), but in general, I was happy with the result.

And check out this latest MIT Media Lab release, LazyTruth, an application interface (API) tool you "call" (send the email containing links you want the veracity verified) and it provides feedback about the details in links allowing you to "vet" what you choose to support or not on your personal social media. No more viral "watch the double moons rising" hoax posts, maybe?

So, what's your solution to an app you've used that you know, could be better?