Over the past few months, I've been putting together my own 'spellbook' program, written in Java. I wanted something to keep track of my character's spellcasting at the gaming table.
The main interface is more or less an overglorified spreadsheet, with a row for each spell that includes columns for each spell's level and the number of times it has been memorized and/or cast. There are buttons off to the side for 'memorize spell', 'cast spell', 'rest and regain spells', and so forth. There is also a spells-per-day block at the top that tracks how many of each spell you have that day and how many you have used so far. There are some additional tidbits in there for changing the background color of the chart per-spell (for 'important' spells), and for applying a metamagic feat to a spell entry.
One of the buttons activates the 'view description' ability, which swaps the spreadsheet tab out for a description tab; this displays the full right-out-of-the-book information block for whichever spell you invoked it on. All of the spells the program knows about are listed in a plain alphabetical list on the side, with a search-by-name box added. The spell descriptions are organized into 'modules' so that you can choose to only use certain ones. (Right now I have modules for the core book, APG, UltMagic and UltCombat, though I will be adding one for the Race Guide and probably one for D&D3.5. Anything OGL should be fair game, right?) New spells can be added in with a little bit of work; spell descriptions are in html, so it gives you extra ability to be creative, but creating a very simple description still requires basic knowledge of xml tags. (The program gives you a 'template', but it's still not as easy a process as I'd like.)
Note that this is a full PC program, not an iPhone/Android app. (I don't own a smartphone but I do have a netbook, so I built this to run on there.) The main program window is not small, giving me plenty of room to make information viewable but unfortunately not lending itself well to being viewed on a phone if I do ever decide to attempt an Android port. Being written in Java, though, should make it work more-or-less right out of the box on a Linux or Mac machine.
My question to the community out there is: Does this sound like something useful to you? If I polished this into a finished program, would anyone use it? Or, perhaps just as importantly, if I put it up on the store and charged .99 cents for it, would anyone buy it? I've been searching around for various pathfinder spellbook apps and there seem to be a ton of them out there, so I was wondering if my program would be unique enough to be desirable to anyone.
I'll post a couple of screenshots or something if anyone is interested. I'll also entertain ideas for new features, if anyone can think of something this program should do. Note that this was mostly intended to be a caster's helper during heavy combats and such; adding advanced spell searches like "display all 3rd-level druid spells" is certainly possible but isn't really in the scope of what I was trying to accomplish.
Thanks for any feedback you can give.
The fact that you have support for metamagic spells is something that pretty much every other spell management program I've seen is missing. Add support for spontaneous casters, and you're golden.
I'd like to throw in some encouragement for that eventual Android port. Maybe optimize it for a tablet before optimizing for a phone display.