Comment by thom
2 years ago
For our first child in 2011, we were struggling to agree on a name, so I created a baby names app that tried to learn the kinds of names you liked, based on sounds, meanings, origins etc. It was my first real attempt at any sort of machine learning, and while we eventually reverted to the much simpler algorithm of my wife putting her foot down, I decided to package it up and launch it on the Mac app store. It was briefly the number one lifestyle app in the UK, and could more or less pay for its own Google Ads, but I killed it off when sandboxing started to make NSDocument based apps break. Some screenshots survive:
https://lemonwatcher.com/baby-names-1.png
https://lemonwatcher.com/baby-names-2.png
https://lemonwatcher.com/baby-names-3.png
I did the same for both of our kids. For the first, I created a web app where you could +1 or -1 on all legal names. I even used the Web Speech API to read aloud the names, if you clicked them.
For the second kid, I created an iOS app using React Native (https://i.imgur.com/aaTqXAY_d.webp?maxwidth=760&fidelity=gra...) where you could swipe names Tinder-style.
We didn't use the apps to find _the_ names, but to get a narrowed down list we could pick from. The projects were fun and educational.