Put Things Off 2, the free update to the laid-back to-do list I made for iPhone, is now live. You can see the full preview at putthingsoff.com or buy it now from the App Store. It’s on sale for a limited time.
The app’s a huge update, and includes some fun new features you won’t have seen in any other to-do list. It follows six months of hard work, and I’d be thrilled if you’d help me by checking it out and spreading the word any way you can. Thanks!
As an iPhone developer, few mistakes are more costly than telling people what you do. Gone are the days when hopeless romantics thought they had a book in them; today they’re full of app ideas:
“I’d like to think I’ve got an app in me,” said one guy I met at a New Year’s Eve party.
What can you do but smile and brace yourself? A game with ninja badgers, an app for detecting cheating spouses, and a tool for measuring the size of your penis and uploading the results to Facebook. I’ve heard them all and wish I’d picked a profession with fewer talking points. Like taxidermy.
Worse is when you’re introduced by your line of work: “Here’s the iPhone developer I was telling you about,” they’ll say. “His name’s Nick,” almost in afterthought. You’ll soon be the sounding board for a thousand drunken app concepts. They should have just hired a clown.
“How about one that finds the nearest [bar/strip club/hooker]?” some idiot will offer. “I’d buy it,” he’ll add, as if to seal its position in the top 100.
When I’m feeling antisocial I tell people I’m a web developer. Nobody bothers a web developer. The longest conversation you can hold with one lasts three minutes. The title exists to blend boredom with confusion — suggesting, perhaps, that you build housing estates for spiders.
If nothing else, it’s taught me that people value great software over great websites; as a web developer, I’m rarely offered exciting website ideas or encouraged to talk at length about upcoming launches. As an iPhone developer, I can’t escape it: within three minutes the theme has turned from the crisis in Haiti to samurai raccoons and dick-measuring apps.
The real Curse of the iPhone developer is not the App Store approval process, having to talk to people at parties, or worrying that you’ll never be invited back; it’s wrestling with a million ideas and deciding which not to build next.
I deeply distrust all forms of technology, none more so than the microwave oven. In the terrible event that I must use one – to dry wet socks or reheat my dampened enthusiasm for British tennis players – I do so only after glancing away, grimacing awkwardly, and shielding my testicles with a bread board.
A healthy disrespect for all things buzzing is what keeps me alive, despite a niggling urge to clean our blender in the bath; I have a long-standing theory that electricity and water would mix fine if you did it fast enough. It may surprise you, then, that I’ve liquidised my scruples by doing what everyone in my position fears will one day come to pass: I’ve bought an iPhone.
Even as a part-reformed nerd who’s wary of getting suckered by hard tech once more, it’s impossible to watch those Apple ads without stopping to consider whether, this time, the New Thing, this Holy Grail amongst handheld thingamibobs, this Golden Apple in an otherwise rotten bunch, could finally be The One: The One that proves tech can be fun instead of faulted. The One that makes you thank your sock drawer full of discarded shiteboxes for leading you to this moment. The One that changes everything. The One that doesn’t disappoint quite as eagerly as a Hugh Grant film.
Perhaps you have noticed an iPhone billboard and paused to admire the object in its svelte, come-hither casing, designed in California, land of sun and sand, but made in China, land of pandas, pork ribs, and exciting retail opportunities.
Or, worse still, maybe you’ve visited an Apple store and been wooed by the sheer theatre of it all: the almost irritatingly helpful yet never knowingly attractive sales people; the array of over-polished products on small marble pedestals; the hallowed Genius Bar; the gathering hordes updating their FaceSpace accounts. Perhaps, in the same moment you noticed that the staircase is fashioned entirely from glass and floating on the sighs of angels, you uttered the same question I did:
“Will this bingling box of crap you’re trying to flog me solve any of my troubles?”
Well, after many months with mine, I’m delighted to tell you that it’s solved so many of my problems that I’ve started trawling the App Store in search of new ones.
The iPhone is the first unnecessary overpriced pocketbox I’ve owned that lives up to more than 14% of the lies I was sold. Not only is it far easier to use than the crap I’ve been tricked into buying before, but it’s one of the few gadgets that answers everyday questions. Questions like “What’s the capital of Narnia?”, or “Where did we park the golf buggy?”, or “What’s that terrible music?”, or “What can I throw at a civic leader that isn’t a shoe?”
And that’s before you start downloading apps. You’ll soon find one for everything. There’s an app that lets you take photos of a book jacket, then check to see if it’s cheaper on Amazon to aid in the demise of your local bookstore. Another tells you where your nearest payphone is, in case you need to seek shelter during a hailstorm.
Others can be quite useful — take the National Rail one, for instance, which tells those of us in the UK where our nearest station is via GPS, what time the next train home is supposed to arrive, and how many minutes after that it will be at the platform.
So, I’ve started to realise that there’s little point in resisting. The mobile revolution is here, and it’s time to make a half-arsed effort and pretend we’re on board. Paper, while I shall always cling to it lovingly, is being left behind. What’s more, so is conventional desktop computing.
The mobile phone is gradually overlapping the realm of the desktop and laptop. Not enough to replace them entirely just yet – maybe not ever – but enough that there is now a growing generation who access the internet exclusively by cell phone; a generation who may never experience the Web on a big screen.
And so, my hope in writing this is to persuade the many waverers and outwardly tech averse to join me by crawling from your caves and giving this exciting new wave of gizmos a go. It’s safe to come out now, I promise. The iPhone’s slowly changing the way I feel about gadgets for the better, and I think it could do the same for you.
And, even if you don’t fancy one, I hope you’ll agree to join in by feigning excitement at the possibilities up ahead — even if, like me, you will always carry a pencil.
