mortenjust.com/experiments

Visual stopwatch. I often want to time things, but the stopwatch app is just so far away. With this app, you take photos to start and stop the timer. It also measures distances and how many floors you climbed.

A Philips Hue controller. Philips Hue is an example of great technology that makes life more difficult than before you installed it. I started an Android app with some simpler controls, hoping I’d get ideas along the way. I didn’t.

Podcasts for Android TV. What is it with set top boxes ignoring video podcasts? I wasn’t able to find an honest podcast player for Fire TV, Apple TV or Android TV. So I made one.

This one may have made it into the speechwriter office in Trump Tower.

Simpler language editor. Inspired by xkcd’s Thing Explainer, I made an editor that only allows the 1,000 most used words in English. It’s harder than you think, and you think harder, to let your reader think less hard and focus on your message. Maybe it’s worth it.

The editor is causing strong emotional reactions.

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A Wi-fi robot. It’s 2016. We encounter bad wifi on a daily basis. We turn off Wifi. We forget to turn it on. This robot industriously puts up a geofence and rembers to turn wifi back on when the user crosses the fence. “Fence” is such a bad word. It implies that you are locked in.

Drag and drop GIFs. I sometimes make GIFs where I work. It’s almost never fun, so I figured it would be great not making them, but still get them. This is the first zero-interaction GIF machine that I know of.

America, Ginsberg. A tweet sent me in this direction. 

Freewriter. A text editor that hacks your attention. A technique frequently taught in writing schools is that you write non-stop for 5 minutes, then pick out the good bits, then repeat. This app helps you keep on track by letting you play a very simple game. 

Twinjack. We can chat online, but we can’t listen to music together. Until now. Jacob and I wanted to make social listening extremely simple. Start the app, share your URL, and then just play your music in Spotify as you usually do. 

Android Tool. Drop-dead easy screenshots and screen videos from Android phones, watches and iPhones. Originally just made for my team in Google, it turned out to be useful for thousands of other people, too. Github. Download.

Chatdots. Simple things in life aren’t always simple on the internet. One example is pointing at stuff while talking. iPhone App Store. Based on this blog post. 

Pocket Casts for Mac. Shiftjelly’s web podcast player is very close to perfect. It just needs keyboard media controls. So I added that and made a Mac app. 

Trajectory Clock. You get two sets of hands. One set is for the current time. The other set shows your ETA to home if you leave now. The watch face uses your current location and speed to calculate when you can be home in this horrible traffic. Github

Nocturnal traffic. Traffic is the kind of info you want continuously, but is boring to look at. So could it be more like a painting on a wall? I use this as my bedside clock. 

Timezone matcher. On an SF-London trip I was wondering what the fastest timezone calculator would look like. Maybe it didn’t need interaction at all? I sketched this up and used it as my lock screen background during the trip.