iOS apps / RandomWords
RandomWords
Shows random words at the press of a button, to bring back a dream or another weak memory.
Work in progress: the first version works, the next version is specified and not built yet. Not on the App Store yet.
What it is for
It is a tool for remembering dreams. It has one screen, and every press of the Generate button shows a few random words. If I press it at a rapid pace, some of the words trigger a dream memory.
I wrote it in the last days of 2021 as "a tool to recover weak memories". By 2024 I was using it for dreams.
How it works
The app carries a list of 6,801 English nouns. Generate picks words from it at random and shows them one per line, white on a dark screen. A stepper sets how many words appear per press (three to begin with), and Undo brings back the previous set in case a word went by too fast.
It is written in Swift with UIKit and a storyboard, and it is the oldest of the apps here, which shows. It needs no network, stores nothing and asks for no permissions.
The next version
The next version is written down as a specification (September 2026) and is not built yet. It adds a lock button. When a word comes close to the dream, you lock it, and from then on the app only shows words that are related to the locked one.
The plan for the mechanics: the relations between the words are probabilities that are computed ahead of time and extracted from a language model, and the random choice is weighted by how frequent a word is. Like the other small apps I plan, it is meant to be a single screen that works offline.
Status
This app is work in progress. The first version dates from December 2021 and works as described above. The version with the lock button exists as a specification only, and RandomWords is a working name. It is not on the App Store yet. A release under Volary AB is planned, without a date so far.