Options and Opinions
I'm interested in hearing what AT folks like, don't like about either their Tarot App(s) or websites offering digital Tarot.
There's a wide range of topics that come under this, I can suggest one to get a good discussion going.
- What's the best method you've used in any App/Website for picking cards from a digital deck?
What do you like most? What do you like least?
What would you like to see Apps/Websites offering in digital Tarot?
I currently use Beautiful Tarot HD, which I think is the best of the deck emulators. On my iPad Pro, it's just beautiful. I like the reading environment. I like the "burst" animation when the shuffle button is pressed. I like the fact the cards behave and feel like cards on-screen; they're like physical objects I can drag and drop with a finger. I like the default "free placement" mode for the cards (with built-in spreads as an option).
Beautiful Tarot HD feels "real' enough that I'm comfortable leaving decks at home when I travel and using the app as my travel deck. It's an elegant, well-designed, attractive solution.
The downside, of course, is the limited number of decks built into the app, with no way to expand them (and a developer who tells me via email he's not making enough money off the app to consider changing or expanding it).
I can see why apps for beginners need to include a guide to tarot card meanings. I know developers tend to use Waite's PKT for this, primarily because it's in the public domain. (It's certainly not due to its readability!) At the risk of tooting my own horn a bit: there are better, more approachable public domain texts out there, freely available to app developers. ;-)
While I appreciate a well-crafted emulator, I'm also interested in what might happen with Tarot when our assumptions about decks and cards fall away. Some ideas:
- What if spreads, instead of being flat on the table, could be rendered in three dimensions?What would it mean for a card to be over or under another? How might a cube of cards be read?
- What if, instead of upright or reversed, cards were dealt at an angle, indicating how strongly the card leaned toward upright or reversed meanings?
- Remember the old "Opening of the Key" spread? Or elemental dignities? It would be interesting if a deck emulator could calculate these values for the reader (since they can be tiresome to calculate by hand).
- What if cards in a spread were "magnetized" in some way, causing some cards to pull closer together (and amplify each other) and others to move apart (and decrease their influence on each other)?
-What if you could click one button and increment or decrement each card in a spread by one? (That is, if you incremented a spread containing Two of Cups, Three of Swords, and Five of Wands, you'd get the Three of Cups, Four of Swords, and Six of Wands.) The original spread might be "What's happening today," with the decremented version representing "What happened yesterday" and the incremented version representing "What will happen tomorrow?"
Just some ideas,
M.