I've been blessed to become trained in the arts of Computer Science, honing my skills at school and at work.
No matter how pro-efficient one becomes in the art of coding wizardry, there's always one limiting factor: having
a good idea. To graduate, we need to do a senior project in a group of 4. We take a semester to create, develop and plan an idea, and another to implement it.
I'm lucky to work a talented and motivated group of 4, we call ourselves git-mo. (Like the popular versioning software, git and Guantanamo bay combined)
We recently decided upon the great idea of a hiking app, one that would allow users to navigate trails using GPS, even when they were offline.
We were all excited and pumped about the idea until our instructor informed us that our idea probably has already been done before. We did a little research and were greatly disheartened by the sheer quantity and quality of many of the existing apps. It's like trying to invent the light bulb 20 years after Edison with only the hopes of creating something 20% as good. We only have 2 semesters. The creators of these apps have sometimes spent
years developing and refining their apps.
One of our team members reminded us that Google emerged in a market saturated with pre-existing search engines. They took an existing idea and made it unique. Now they're dominating force in the tech world.
While, I think just creating a working hiking/GPS app that integrates maps and GPS coordinates will be a miracle just to get working (maybe it wont' be, I've just never done anything like it!) adding a distinguishable, useful, and unique feature seems even more daunting. Like the old adage says, we have to think outside the box. Whatever the case, I'm to the challenge and I remain optimistic!
Here's a couple of the ideas we found:
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| AllTrails interface, similar to what we want to do. |
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