couples therapy chat

As part of a more general initiative to take ownership of my data by hosting it myself, I cobbled together a chat app. My target audience is limited to me and my wife mostly discussing logistics. A fancy way of phrasing "what's for dinner", "there is nothing in the fridge", "what time are we supposed to pick up the kid?"

I adapted (essentially rewrote) some PHP code I found lying around on the web. Access to extensive chat history proved extremely useful in resolving misunderstandings. Read that: "who was right™?" Checking in several times over the course of the day allows us to feel more connected while still respecting the natural rhythms and workflow of the day.

Amusingly the chat app is hooked up to the speech synthesis module of our whole house stereo and features WebCam integration so that we can virtually harass the pets from work. Because I am a programmer, so of course it is ridiculous.

The minor innovation that I actually find interesting, however, is integration of a split panel slideshow showing a synchronized slideshow of our families digital photo collection. I tumbled to the idea because I wanted to curate an extensive and chaotic mess. I added some classification tools and UI to archive images. We could cleanup and enjoy our collection even when the other party was unavailable..

In hindsight I see that sharing happy family memories together while discussing sometimes contentious matters was probably a fortuitous discovery. I'm only half kidding when I suggest holding family arguments over a digital picture frame.