George W. Bush may be The Decider, but imagine how the last eight years might have turned out if he'd had a little help with some of the weightier dilemmas he faced.

Invade Iraq? He might have asked the Magic 8 Ball. "Outlook not so good," the mysterious orb might have cautioned.

What if he'd had more than one deciding tool at his disposal?

Perhaps he could have flipped a coin. Heads: Take Cheney bird hunting. Tails: Cancel eye-gazing with Putin.

Too late for Bush, but just in time to aid the next Decider-in-Chief, Boise entrepreneur Jason Crawforth and a small group of software developers from MobileDataforce have created just such a tool. Called iMakeDecisions, it lets you pick 10 ways to make decisions on the screen of an iPhone or an iPod Touch.

You can use the dart board to choose one of several international currencies. You can use the random number generator to pick a lottery number.

Crawforth and his friends use the wishbone to decide who will buy the next beer.

iMakeDecisions could make the next leader of the free world appear resolute in every situation, whether picking Powerball numbers or choosing beneficiaries of federal bailouts.

Boise patent attorney Steven Nipper was an early adopter of the application. He swears he hasn't used it to make any serious decisions but has considered using it to choose a place to eat.

"The really impressive thing about it is the artwork," he said. "The graphics are really sharp, and I like the sound effects. It's a lot better than a lot of the apps I've seen."

Crawforth - who founded Treetop Technologies in Boise, sold it to Boise's MobileDataforce at 3380 Americana Terrace in January, and stayed with the company - decided to develop iPhone applications after concluding that Apple's iTunes App store had "provided the most powerful marketing tool in history."

"The iTunes App Store provides iPhone users with programs to run on the devices and funnels the worldwide market into the one place they can get them," he said.

His team spent a few months programming the app and went to Tricycle LLC, 702 W. Idaho St., for the three-dimensional graphics.

The product launched on the iTunes store Nov. 11. Within a week the $2 program had broken into the top 100 most popular "lifestyle" apps, despite competing against many that are free to download. iMakeDecisions' break-even point is $15,000, he said.

The next app will have lower startup costs because the equipment has been paid for. Crawforth is paying the programmers with royalties, which lowered his initial costs. Apple keeps 30 percent of each download, and the balance goes straight to Crawford, who is busily working on his next iPhone app. He doesn't want to divulge too much but says it should be ready in the next month.

Brad Talbutt: 672-6737