face it: there’s an app for that
Throughout the course of the past week, I have saved about five unfinished columns to my Documents folder (which really should be renamed “Evidence of Writer’s Block”). They all, for lack of a better term, suck.
So this afternoon, to dispel my moody self-pitying rants of “I suck as a writer”, I decided to put aside my computer for a while and relax with a game or two.
What did I immediately turn to? My trusty iPhone. A few minutes of iAssociate 2 and I felt immediately better – and just as I was wracking my brain to think of a word associated with “volcano”, it hit me.
Applications! That’s what I should write about! So here we are.
The iPhone itself deserves a column of its own, so I’ll strictly stick to applications for the purposes of this one. For those of you still rocking a Nokia 3310, applications are programs that you download for your iPhone (or similar device), which can cure boredom, aid procrastination, waste time, or help you to win at life.
Need to order a pizza quickly? There’s an app for that. Want to know what that song on the radio is? There’s an app for that. Want to learn kanji? There’s an app for that. Need a travel guide for *insert country here*? There’s an app for that. Need a metronome, spirit level, torch or ruler? …Well, you get the picture.
It’s fairly standard to get the application addiction shortly after you get an iPhone. You can online shop, read comics, learn pickup lines, take crazy photos, and do all manner of things that sci-fi writers only dreamed of 50 years ago. Why wouldn’t you get carried away? I personally spent many time-wasting hours maintaining a virtual restaurant that didn’t even provide any good virtual rewards, let alone actual ones. But let’s not talk about that.
As far as applications go, some are stupidly popular – Fruit Ninja, Angry Birds, Shazam, Doodle Jump, Facebook and Google Earth are all high up there. Others are completely useless and exist purely for novelty value – Bubble Wrap, Lightsaber! and iBeer, for example, all of which do nothing but imitate things that would be much cooler in real life.
At the moment, the App Store offers about 300,000 apps – so it’s not really a surprise that they do range from useful (like recipe apps or GPS apps) to ridiculous. A few that are notorious for being particularly weird include Hold On! (where you see how long you can press a virtual button – whoa!); Drunk Dialer (which randomly dials numbers in your phonebook for you, a great idea when drunk); and Rimshot & Crickets (no longer do you need to make your own sound effects whenever someone cracks a funny!).
At the end of the day though, most applications are good for about ten minutes, and then you forget about them until the next time you’re drunk. Maybe they are just another way for technology to encourage us to waste time, or for Apple to make money, or for the iPhone to become even more ingrained in our lives. But then again, maybe it’s just a bit of fun. As long as I live in a world where I can make words with friends or play Tetris whenever I want, I’m kind of okay with it.
What’s on my iPhone?
Here are just a few of the apps that I’ve spent my hard-earned money on. Go figure.
Hipstamatic: Shhh. It’s okay to be a hipster because these photos look so darn retro cool.
NASA: I’m a space nerd – I like to see what NASA is up to. Sometimes I just like to look at the pretty pictures of stars.
Bump: Super easy to swap photos and phone numbers with friends – you just fist bump them while holding your phone! You get to look ghetto and exchange information.
Shazam: I’m usually too slow to use this app properly – by the time I’ve fumbled for my phone (and dropped it), the song is over. If I wasn’t such a klutz though, Shazam would be instrumental in helping me find out what “that” song is.
IMDb: Even though I retain a stupid amount of information regarding actors and the small television roles they once played, sometimes I need a little help.
Domino’s: I like pizza. I don’t like the people who work at pizza stores who don’t understand how to be nice over the phone or record your order correctly. Solved!
FortuneBall: Sometimes, the only thing that can answer your pressing life questions is a Magic 8 Ball application that can’t even be called that because of copyright.
