The rainbow’s potential…

Uses, looks, platforms.

(The images below are mockups, not working apps!)

A Digital Asset Management app

The “rainbow” still works even if constrained to shades of grey (as in Adobe Photoshop for example).

A gallery format for images is no problem – tagging and tag display is done on each image using the image’s individual ‘slice’ of rainbow.

A few ‘doodles’ for rainbow skins

Classical architecture

Seaside cottages

Liquorice Allsorts (a somewhat less format approach!)

Front-end for Gmail

(One unified system would replace mailboxes, labels, stars, and paperclips)

How Gmail could look on a mobile

Front-end for Google

As wonderful as Google is, we think it’s a shame that the trend of their search engine has been to rely more and more on text search alone, and to hide the search tools away. They want their own algorithms to do all the ‘thinking’ for us, and they seem not to want us to tailor the results for ourselves. Our rainbow takes the opposite approach, and would put all the control right back in the users’ hands, by making the filters a basic part of the architecture. Google are really about searching; we are focused more on browsing. Here is one way we could marry the Google look with our functionality…

A song organizer / player to improve on iTunes

Playlists are groups – and organizing by grouping is yesterday’s way. A tagging system – like our rainbow – gives you much more control over your music. Tags would be divided into pages such as ‘Genre’, ‘Country’, ‘Decade’, ‘Duration’, and would let you filter on any tags in any combination, so you could play exactly what you wanted to hear at any particular moment.

YouTube (and Flikr and Picasa and Pinterest and…)

on a mobile

on a tablet

The rainbow does faceted browsing, only better…

Property websites (and general retail websites) use something called “faceted browsing” to let you zero in on what you’re looking for. A ‘facet’ would be something like price, number of bedrooms, type of property, etc. Each facet is divided up into a number of values. This is broadly what our rainbow does – we call a facet a ‘page’ and a facet value a ‘tag’ – but our rainbow does a lot more as well – to mention just one advantage, users can create their own facets and values to better organize their data. The two examples below imagine how a real-estate site could be ‘rainbowized’ – on a mobile screen to highlight how compact and powerful the rainbow can be.

Using the system-provided tags – the current ‘query’ is shown along the top (as is standard for all rainbow programs). Tags can be combined positively or negatively; for example you could say “exclude commercial property from the current search”.

Users can very easily set up their own tags to organize their data. Existing faceted browsing systems don’t provide this – the rainbow does, and seamlessly integrates it with the system tags to make the whole thing easy to learn and use.