Lots of little icons in a big rectangle

So here we are in 2013, and ony of my many resolutions is to update this blog at least once a week, so here’s my attempt at making some interesting observations about the internet at large.

So everyone’s got smartphones, and tablet-based computing looks to be the In Thing for who knows, at least a few more months, so I thought I’d do some market research on what people are building out there before dabbling in the Android / Apple / Blackberry ‘app’ marketplaces.

So as is my wont, I’ve created a website which I’ll probably never finish; this one’s called appnav.net (which sounds a bit like satnav, hence my entertaining homepage icon) with which I intend to use to create an overview of Every App Ever Made.

As a first step in determining how many applications are out there, I’ve downloaded the description of every app within my target sector (food/dining) and compressed and compiled the images into a mosaic, which I will now display to you for your general entertainment and amusement.

The idea is that if you enter a search criteria, it will reduce the number of icons on the grid, and by hovering the mouse the grid you can get more detailed information. Let’s assume for now that the searching/hovering code doesn’t work yet, but just creating the mosaic was a bit fiddly, so let’s have a look at that for starters.

Each icon in the grid below is an application in the Apple store in the ‘Food/Dining’ category… I’ll eventually expand this to cover other vendors and categories, but I thought this interesting enough to publish whilst my appnav site has an animated ‘under construction’ logo early-adopter customer signup form on it.

The thing that struck me about this image is that it looks startlingly similar to The Million Dollar HomePage, if you can remember that from circa 2005.

Except it’s much, much bigger.

And instead of paying $100 for a 10×10 pixel square, people are paying Apple $99 for a licence to plonk their app up in their store.

Which is completely different.

At any rate, what you really want to do is sign up to venue-menu.com.au, which in time will be some kind of ‘google for restaurant menus’ that will allow you to find good and/or cheap burritos, pad thai, and other exotic foodstuffs in Brisbane.

This, like many of my projects, does not actually exist in any completed or tangible form, but this does allow me to think of it in terms of the spiritual enlightenment that will one day occur when everyone signs up to it and I somehow end up with vast amounts of cash.