Attention all mobile app developers: I’m about to give you an idea for a great new consumer app.
I think it’s something that would appeal to any adventurous, creative, curious person—travelers, outdoorsmen, students, scrapbookers, artists, and the like. I think this is the moment to build it, since it’s something that wouldn’t have been possible before the emergence of tablet devices with built-in cameras, such as the iPad 2, the Samsung Galaxy Tab, and the Motorola Xoom. I’m not going to charge you a dime for this idea, because I just want to see it get built. I’d do it myself if I had the programming and design skills, but I don’t—and besides, I’m a little busy right now running Xconomy San Francisco. If you decide to build it, just make me an unpaid advisor to your startup or something. Okay?
This app is called Leonardo’s Notebook. Here’s the two-sentence description. You can put this right at the top of the app’s listing in the iTunes App Store or the Android Market: “Leonardo’s Notebook brings a little bit of the artistic and scientific spirit of Leonardo da Vinci into your life. It gives you the tools to be a better observer, organizer, curator, and explorer of the interesting people, places, events, and objects in your world.“
Features:
* Capture the cool stuff in your world in still photos, short videos, and audio recordings.
* Create digital drawings, doodles, and paintings and compose text files.
* Copy text, e-mails, maps, or images from the Web or other apps.
* Save the items you capture or create as “scraps” on personalized notebook pages with the look and feel of paper journals or scrapbooks.
* Edit, annotate, resize, and reposition your scraps to create beautiful and instructive pages.
* Make pages interactive by linking scraps to each other and to the Web.
* Export and share all or parts of your notebook pages as images, PDFs, or public Web pages.
* See other users’ public notebooks and comment on them.
* Search your own notebooks by keyword.
* Discover new ideas. Use words, phrases, or images in scraps to proactively search for related material on the Web, or allow the app to automatically find and highlight media, products, and events related to your scraps.
* Don’t worry about losing stuff—every scrap and page is automatically copied to a secure online account.
There could be lots of other features too, but if you’re a developer looking for a challenging project, those should be enough to get you started.
Here’s the backstory to this concept, with a bit of detail about where the ideas come from, how the software should work, and why I think it could be an important, best-selling app.
First off, I’m a huge fanboy of Leonardo da Vinci, the famous painter-architect-inventor-scientist who lived in Florence and Milan from 1452 to 1519 and is the very definition of the Renaissance man. A couple of years ago, I went through a phase where I was consuming everything about him that I could get my hands on. If you were reading my stuff back then, you probably noticed this, as I worked mentions of Leonardo into an embarrassing number of columns and articles.
Since Leonardo didn’t leave behind any published works, we know him entirely through his paintings (of which only 22 survive), what little his contemporaries wrote about him, and his voluminous journals—there are about 5,000 pages in all. In the journals, Leonardo recorded sketches, quotations, diagrams, thought experiments, arguments with himself, and even daily trivia like packing lists. They are a remarkable record of a mind at work. Leonardo tried to make sense of the things he observed by recording them in extreme visual detail; in a sense he was the first multimedia producer, frequently mixing pictures and text on a single page. The journals allow us to chart Leonardo’s lifelong obsessions with matters such as the nature of light, the behavior of water, the motions of animals and people, the internal structure of the human body, the flight of birds, and the possibility of mechanical flight.
By today’s standards, a lot of Leonardo’s thinking was pre-scientific. He didn’t have the concept of formulating a hypothesis and then attempting to disprove it. He seemed to prefer to work out an idea in his own head, then comb the external world for examples that supported it, even twisting the details when necessary. Nevertheless, he was a consummate observer. He saw things that nobody else had ever noticed (or at least, that nobody had bothered to record), such as the way water flowing in a river ripples and coils around an obstacle. Some biographers have even suggested that Leonardo was a genetic freak, gifted with a neuro-optical system that somehow allowed him to see faster than other people, like a photographer with a strobe flash. I doubt that; my own interpretation is that his ravenous curiosity gave him the patience to look closer at things, with fewer preconceptions.
What does all that have to do with us today and our mobile gadgets and apps? I think there’s a lot to admire in Leonardo’s habit of understanding-through-recording. Moreover, it’s pretty clear that young children are born scientists, spending big chunks of their waking time
