| NOTE: A couple of harmless bugs may be obesrved when this is used on newer Windows operating systems. | |
 |
(All
screen shots made using a generic Windows theme and color scheme)
This screen shot shows one of our favorite
"stock profiles" with random output, and output logging
enabled to insure that no great idea need die from momentary brain fade. The
program includes
a wealth of features for wordsmiths and creative professionals, including sophisticated
multiple
random generation, full-featured profile editor and a high-quality built-in
text editor.
Notable features Dual-purpose design: built for entertainment and serious creative use; instantly entertaining and packed with features for serious brainstorming.
Twelve presupplied phrase and word component lists for hours of senseless fun. Just add water for some instant grins. "Stock" lists include the Ultimate Band Name Generator, Job Title Munger, our world-famous Client-controllable Hyperbrandalator (product naming aid), and The Epithetician (a powerful insult generator... have deodorant handy) and the unimaginably practical Excuse Generator (coming with the first batch of downloadable add-on profiles; our best profiles take three to six hours to produce and we haven't had time yet to do this one justice).
Two-click import/export of user-generated profiles, and a Jargonizer user-submitted downloads page for exchanging your creations with other users.
Profiles manager allows for rapid setup of new phrase component lists and removal of unneeded lists. Create shareable configurations and word lists from your own custom setups in just seconds.
Backup manager for maintaining "clean" installations and minimizing disk space usage demonstrates our commitment to making this program much more than just a desktop novelty.
Integrated full-featured text editor for editing and browsing word lists, logged output, or any type of textfile.
Useful productivity features for professional wordsmiths, including a logging function, copy-to-clipboard, a built-in text editor for managing profiles and working with saved word and phrase logs, at-a-glance profile/component list access for rapid sampling of all possible phrase combinations, constraining of phrase components, random generation of hundreds or thousands of words or phrases in a single pass and more.
Fully documented with a complete helpfile, fully-described public-domain file specification and informative "balloon help" for every control on every dialog.
Everything in just one dialog with a minimum of confusing clutter, and a host of user-configurable options and "transparent" convenience features to make working with the tool a breeze from the first time you use it.Is there a better way to waste the next hour of your life? We think not. We deliberately set out to create one of the most worthless applications imaginable. We failed. Miserably. What began as a pure novelty application simply grew beyond our control into what we think you'll agree can be a downright useful creative tool.
Jargonizer is provided for two primary purposes: entertainment and creative brainstorming. It began as a random funny phrase generator with a few extra features. It grew to become an idea generator, creative branding tool, domain name generator, and much, much more. It's the perfect tool for producing that new word or phrase that brainstorming and research can't isolate.
As a brainstorming tool, it was engineered to be a fully-configurable recombinant phrase generator, allowing both random and sequential sampling of phrase component combinations and a collection of configuration options that we've never seen matched in a program of this type.
As a novelty program, it's designed to produce humorous combinations of phrase components using presupplied phrase component lists which we believe are superior in quality to anything currently available. These component lists were created by a career creative professional, not a programmer, and we believe they're superior in quality to those of any comparable tool or toy.
Professional uses for The Jargonizer
The application's entertainment value is obvious and merits no further comment. (The band name generator kicks...hey, who wouldn't kill for the first CD by The Unbearable Plastic Lunchmonkeys from Dimension X?) Its professional applications may be less obvious, so here's a brief list:
- Acronym generation: Build a list of components for a product or organization name, and in a couple of minutes you can recombine them hundreds of ways to determine a useful term that works both as a phrase and as an acronym. Manual recombination for this purpose can take hours, and often relies on memory.
- Tagline generation: How you interpret this depends on your definition of "tagline". Marketing professionals, for whom "tagline" is synonymous with "slogan", may find this tool useful for rapidly matching lists of candidate word prefixes, words and phrases so that hundreds of different tagline combinations can be previewed in minutes. This sort of task typically takes hours using paper or a word processor, or days if you rely on focus groups.
- Title munging: These days it seems like it's harder to come up with the right word for a new-technology worker's job description than it is to fill the position itself. Plug a bunch of likely title components into the generator and sample them sequentially until one fits.
- Unblock1ng cAtA1yZt: All too often, creative professionals find tools like this utterly useless for producing results they can use, but absolutely invaluable for providing the clues to their own best ideas. When the brain is reduced to mush from too much or too little stimulation, it often takes a catalyst to make that next idea crystalize, and it may be less important that a brainstorming session produce a useful result than it is that the session clears the mind for the useful result to peek through. Don't be surprised if you get an idea from a half-forgotten Jargonizer phrase in a day or two that wasn't even on the radar when you were using the tool. That's what inspiration is all about, and that's what Jargonizer is for.
This tool, as with all Plain Brown Power utilities, has its limitations. Most of the known limitations in these tools are voluntary and deliberate. If there's a limitation here that significantly affects your decision about whether this tool deserves a permanent place in your toolkit, by all means let us know.
File format: The file format used by profiles and phrase component lists is proprietary and was developed exclusively for use with Jargonizer. While I make no claim on the file format (meaning that it can be freely copied and duplicated by anyone for any purpose), it is not compatible with any other known application..
Profile count: All profile information other than phrase components is stored in Jargonizer.ini. Due to limitations within Windows itself, this file will become unstable and unreliable at file sizes greater than approximately 25kb. (The official maximum size for an INI file according to Microsoft is 32kb; in practice, reliability begins to suffer at closer to 25kb.) While there is no strict limit on the number of profiles that the program can store, the practical limit imposed by INI file size restrictions ranges from 50 to 80.
| Release version | Notes |
| 1.02 (04/02) |
Maintenance release. Numerous minor bug fixes and enhancements. |
| 1.00 (12/01) |
First public release. |
| Package title | The Jargonizer |
| Version | 1.02b |
| Download file size(s) | 577kb |
| Installer/uninstaller |  |
| Source code available | Yes |
| Win31/NT3.51-compatible | No |
| Win95/98/ME/XP-compatible | |
| WinNT4/W2K/XP Pro-compatible | |
| Copyright/distribution status | Donationware |
The Jargonizer is copyright ©2001-2002 Cub Lea. This software may not be redistributed except by the publisher or an exclusive licensee. Neither the archive, the installation, nor any files contained in the original archive as posted by the publisher may be modified in any fashion except where otherwise specified.
Trademarks? Are you kidding? I purposely chose the simplest, most generic names we could think of for Plain Brown Power software products. I'm a professional myself, and I don't believe that fancy names or expensive trademarks add a thing to the work environment. I've yet to meet a professional who did believe that...who wasn't a marketer or salesperson.
Posting and non-Internet publication permissions
Please do not post this software on other websites. The posting of a short-term release with problems which have since been fixed reflects badly on everyone, and that includes you as the host.
If you wish to link directly to the download archive, then don't even ask...you can't. Bypassing the license page is strictly forbidden.
CD/DVD publishers are not permitted to include this software on magazine disks, shareware CDs, etc. Since there is no simple way to do this and still retain my protection against unwanted legal action, I can't allow this software to be redistributed in any other way but on this site through the license pages.
