The purpose of this website is to provide a place where I and others can actively explore how we, as individuals, work and play, not by talking but by doing. To meet that goal I am creating apps that help you get things done and promote learning, discovery and play.
The activities featured here offer new and old ideas expressed as apps, database apps (translation: apps that remember), and games that provide opportunities to explore those ideas and exercise personal discovery, learning, knowing, task completion, long and short‑term memory recall, decision‑making, and play. Your comments about what you find here and your ideas for apps or games you are willing to make public are welcome. Original ideas will display your copyright. Send comments and ideas to Bill@wceDesign.com or call me at 207 701‑9001 between 11 a.m. and 6 p.m. When I can, I’ll take your call. If I don’t answer, please leave a message with your number and times I can call you back or text me. You can also record your ideas in the public idea database that is part of idearound.com Thanks. As and if I can, I’ll try to make your ideas come to life.
My goal is to add more “idearounding” to life. Thank you to Anthropic’s Sonnet and Claude Code for making it much easier and much, much faster for me to do the design, coding and technical work necessary to bring so many ideas to life – the Idea database, the game and toy design playpen Choices (find it in Collections), the Time Apps, tools like Double and Triple Timer, and following the Idea database the present crop of other useful database apps (Life Timer, To-Do Database, Gifts Database, Project Timer, and Meeting Notes) and games like The Button Game, abc · 123 and WODIFF – in the short time this website has been live. That includes increasingly sophistocated additions to the database apps, now with searching, sorting, exporting, public and private records, secure logins and private session monitoring to warn users if they login more than once (e.g. from a computer and then their phone), and optional login timeouts. Many apps and games will change and improve over time. And interesting ideas will continue to pop into existence here. An app for tracking Physical Therapy Exercise sessions is our most recent.
If your interactions with these apps and games are successful, you will learn, discover, gain a little more control of your life, have fun, reflect, and hopefully be a bit more thankful for your precious life, the precious lives of others, and the wonders of human creativity. Thank you. I’m glad you’re here
All interactive apps and games are free to use at idearound.com, are available for installation on networks and websites for no licensing charge to parents, educators and educational organizatons under open source licensing, and to businesses and other individuals for nominal fees. Please see our licensing page for more information.
My first complex relationship with AI began on Monday May 4, 2026 when I started using AI to help me build this interactive website with apps and games. Ideas I had thought and dreamed about for many years and could describe to the AI in detail could be created in, literally, minutes. Instead of hours, days, weeks, months of research and hard work demanding careful attention to details, if I could envision an idea and describe what I wanted to Sonnet (a Claude mid-tier model) AI and later, to Claude Code AI wired to a programmer’s editor, I could collaborate with the AI doing the hard, intricate work, knowing in its web sized mind all the proven solutions, and proven designs also, to do anything I had in mind. My experience as a programmer and database developer helped me communicate, test, correct and tune each solution. It’s important to note that my collaboration with Claude Code is also becoming more valuable over time; I can ask Claude to remember operations that I know I will want to do again. That growing store of know-how makes our work together more and more efficient. As a subnote, one reason I started working with AI on the idearound.com project was to do research for a planned series of poetry books about humans and machines in the future. I did not expect the human transformation that occured.
idearound ‑ a place for exploring ideas
Collections and sequences, named sets (strings of “things”) to explore, create, or share — art shows, galleries, books and selections from books (current focus is poetry), named sets of poems, links, and more, including a game design toy called “choices.”
Explore collections → a poem about reality Days & DatesThree calculators for measuring and remembering time — birthdays, memories, and the distance between one day in the past and another.
Choose an app → a poem about time GamesWord games, strategy board games, puzzles, and learning games — including games designed to be played by an adult together with children as young as preschool age. Designed by experienced game designers. More games coming soon.
Choose a game → about Bill and games Idea Apps & (future) ToysCapture and develop ideas for apps, games, features, and more. Each idea can grow with descriptions, and unlimited notes for related thoughts added over time.
Explore ideas → a poem titled “artist” Useful AppsDouble Timer runs two named timers in alternating sequence — work and move, talk and listen, any two‑phase rhythm. Also: the Gifts Database, Life Timer, Project Timer, Meeting Notes, the handy To‑Do Database, and Triple Timer. All database apps have support both public and private records with a simple login scheme. These apps can be used anytime, from anywhere, on any device that connects to the internet.
Open tools → a poem about clever ideas