TalkFlare Logo

My longest-running project that's still under construction, TalkFlare, has been a lot of work since I initially came up with it. This idea formed in part thanks to something mentioned by Tom Scott, in a Park Bench Video in which he mentions an idea he called "Pub Flares." Shortly thereafter, the power of mundane tasks caused that to fall back into my mind, along with the plight of a couple of my close friends.

Some people, as I personallly know, find it very difficult to start conversations - particularly at times where they need to. Often this is connected to feeling like you're bothering someone, other times it's simply a worry about not knowing how to react in the social situation. Thus, the idea for TalkFlare was born.

TalkFlare, at it's core, is just a button. You press the button, and it sends a message to a group of people at your choosing, telling them that you want to talk to someone. What happens after that, is out of the scope of TalkFlare. All TalkFlare does, is get the ball rolling, so that you can talk to someone. It's not designed to be a messaging service, it's not designed to be popular. It's just designed to be something of an SOS button for people who need to talk to others, but can't find it in themselves to start the conversation. That niche, is what TalkFlare is being made for.

The only problem now is development. TalkFlare was intitially developed using Unity, as it was what I knew and I did not expect TalkFlare to take a long time. That was about March of last year, and suffice to say, a lot has changed since then. A mix of personal issues and issues with development caused me to push the project back from 2020, to a 2021 release date - and despite having restarted the app's development from the ground up, so I can utilise the much better optimised Android SDK with Android Studio, I succeeded in releasing the project for Android on September 12th 2021.

However, at the time of release, there were a lot of issues that we hadn't noticed, due to time crunching - as a result, we swiftly realeased a 1.1 update, resolving as many of the main issues as possible - however, there's still a large number of issues. We hope to resolve these as soon as possible.

Version 2 of TalkFlare, with Android and iOS support, is in development. Feel free to visit it's website.