Waaay back in October (just a month ago) Mint Digital gave a sort of challenge / request to each of their designers, each one of them would have to come up with their own unique Android App concept – the best one would be made into an actual, working release. The four concepts they came up with are named thus: Visual Feeder, Hold that Sound, Baseball Matchup, and PaperClip. Below we’ll take a brief look at each of these. Which one would you choose?
First is Visual Stream (pictured above): It works as a feed reader, specializing in visual feeds, with a directory of feeds that you can add to at any time individually, or add to by syncing with your Google Reader. Endlessly scroll through images, favorite, and share with social networks. Save feeds for offline browsing, categorize, and move items back to your desktop by syncing with DropBox.
Next there’s Hold That Sound for moving and saving audio files from the web to your phone in one step. This app seems to be be for 100% legal audio downloads, downloads that are saved to your phone and organized and played in a rather beautiful environment. Erasing the step between downloading a mixtape, speech, or podcast and having it on your phone.
After that, there’s Baseball Matchup – definitely made for the baseball fan, especially one who’s going to be hanging out at the actual game. Just select your game (from the MLB), download matchup info, calibrate your view by taking photos with your phone with crosshairs on home plate and both foul poles, and bam! You’ve got the entire roster and a field full of yellow and red, yellow being hits, red being outs. This info is reflective of previous pitcher and batter matchups and displays them in augmented reality. “Notice gaps the fielders haven’t spotted. Understand why certain batters struggle against particular pitchers.” Get a deeper insight into the game than you’ve ever had before.
Finally, PaperClip is an audio reader, converting your Instapaper articles into listenable audio, allowing you to choose then from many different narrators (lets hope for Darth Vader) and adjustments to the audio as you go. This app will be synced to your Instapaper account and you can organize and archive from your phone. Turn your browsing and reading into listening while you’re jogging or driving in the car.
Mint Digital will announce very soon which one of these apps will make it past the chopping block into reality. Which one would you choose? Can you tell which one I’d choose? Hint: I wouldn’t actually use it more than a few times a year, but those few times would be AWESOME.
[Via MintDigital]
