I got into keeping ants a few year ago and I am enjoying it a lot. I would currently still consider myself to be completely clueless about most things compared to you guys, but at times i am able to impress friends and family with my completely irrelevant ant knowledge.
However when i first started out ant keeping all I had to lead me were pretty much youtube videos and a few forum posts. However ants can often not be generalized about the care they require (nutrition, humidity, lighting, difficulty to keep, required space, outworld-style, etc.) especially over all the different species.
As the subject title already hints I had the idea of creating a hands-on, beginner friendly cross-platform application (at least ios, android and web) that provides information about the previously mentioned topics and much more. The basic idea only got to me recently, so i haven't really put a lot of thought into it, but also who am I to think about something I have very little knowledge about? I can only speak for myself about the information that i would like to have had at hand when starting out.
So here is where you guys, the more experienced parants (hehe - get it?), come into play:
- First of all: Do you think you might want to use such an application?
- Would you have wished for a straight forward "guide-book" when you started out or where you more about the "learning by doing" experience?
- If the reception is well I would like to use this thread as kind of a kick-off for feature brainstorming, so shoot.
- Species specific care guides (e.g. nutrition which would be divided into protein and sweets, each containing a list of possible options based on community input)
- Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning for queen ant species identification (just snap a picture of the queen and have the name of the species displayed on the screen)
- Equipment references (could for example be the AntsCanada-ant-store) so that beginners can easily find items they might need. (this feature could be linked to the species care guide so that you immediately find fitting nests, outworlds, liquid feeder sizes and more)
- Living food guide (e.g. crickets, worms) with example setups, what food they require and how often. (also how to prepare them for feeding them to the ants and killing them humanely)
(If this application seems to be requested by the ant loving community i will ensure the feasibility analysis of the specific features at a later stage)
To get a bigger picture of who I am and why I want to do this: Except from enjoying natures beauty, my other activities in life are mostly revolving around networking, engineering and development. Especially in the software sector that is (even though i have a bit of education in hardware as well). Since I travel a lot I have fully automated my ant setups with feeding-, humidity-, lighting- and temperature-control by developing an IoT-system that lets me observe and control all these parameters from anywhere. It is not as great as observing them directly for hours, but it is the closest thing to it that I can get sometimes. As for my experience: I have developed and published quite a few native-, as well as cross-platform-applications in the past, even founded two companies that are centered around doing so from which i am living quite comfortably.
Of course I will keep you guys up-to-date if this project finds footing.
