Have you ever asked the question "where do you want to eat?", or "what bar should we hit up?", or maybe even "which nursing home should we throw granny in?". We know. You have decisions to make. You have things to do. What to wear, what to eat, with whom to eat. Every decision you make, every sunk cost, is a little bit of stress you dont want and dont need. So stop deciding. The Decision Machine (aka Random Picker) automates the minutiae of your day to day life, leaving you to focus on the things that matter. Simply enter anything, such as "food", "bars", or even "nightclubs", (literally ANYTHING), employ your own filters and preferences to limit your results, and be done with your decisions once and for all. Condense every trivial aspect of your life down to a simple question: Yes or no? Be done with sweating the small stuff once and for all. Want to try it out? Yes or no?
How It Works:
The Decision Machine will pseudorandomly pick a nearby (3km) place for you to go. Simply enter a place in the text field, such as: "food", "books", "dog grooming", "auto repair", "grocery", "gas", etc., and then press "Go". An alert box will appear to confirm your selection. If you are unhappy with this decision, select "Pick Again" and press the big question mark button in the middle to have The Decision Machine pick another place of the same type (no need to retype your place). If you are happy with the decision, select "Ok" and Apple Maps will open and will route you to your destination. However, since the search is local, youll probably already know where the place is. By default, pressing the big question mark button in the middle (without entering anything in the text field) will automatically search Apple Maps for nearby "food" and pick a food place for you. However, pressing this button upon typing anything will repeatably search and pick places for that same place. Press the little question mark button for help.
Notes:
The Decision Machine employs Apple Maps to retrieve potential destinations. This means that if you do not have a place matching your request within 3km of you, the app might route you to a far-away place. For example, if the 3km area around you does not have "physics research", you might be routed to the nearest place that does have "physics research", which may not even be in your state (or country). However, this may be a great way to learn of places you never knew about. Maybe it might even spark some vacation ideas, so feel free to type anything!
Development:
I had originally planned to make this a FOSS project, but I had not anticipated having to pay Apple so much (duh). So, sorry, until I figure out a free way to mass distribute this app without the App Store, its gotta be a dollar. That being said, I still have the same FOSS philosophy in mind, so you, The People, please feel free to contribute (either in code or ideas), mod, and/or help me out by forking me at https://github.com/DrSmythe/Random____Picker.git. You can shoot me an email at [email protected] to voice concerns, give code snippets, complaints, or anything else. I may also email the app project for your personal modding pleasure, upon request.
Future Goals:
Completely omit non-relevant results, such as ones that are >1 hour away.
Implement a fully-functional internal map.
Change the fonts in the alert boxes match the fonts of the Title label and text field (and add bullet points).
Make the current layout work smoothly for all devices.
Obviously need an Android version :)