For a Luddite like me, this homing pigeon-like app is truly awesome, writes Denis Beckett.
Johannesburg – A thousand new apps a day. Half of all apps are free. Game apps sell at average US 63c. Apps that do things average $1.27. There are 10 000 app developers; 160 of them make lots of money.
Very awesome and, wow, but what floats my boat is an app I just saw in action, finding keyrings.
This is not one of the innumerable apps that, as soon as it’s invented, you realise is the answer to a dire predicament you never previously knew you had. No, not for me. I’m in the middle league of keyring-losers. What’s more, I am married to a radical non-keyring-loser who not only never loses her own, but deciphers where mine is before I finish my sentence telling her I’ve lost it.
I know Olympic-league keyring-losers, though, including certain house guests. What a pity it’s February. I’d love to stock up for Christmas presents now, while they cost $1.27, but you can’t buy Christmas presents in February. Not anymore.
Too bad that the keyring finder is newer than T20, newer than Sevens, newer than Gay Marriage. It’s an app. In December, a February app will be prehistoric. It will feel like a one-rand note, like a car’s crankhandle, like a bottle opener hanging from a belt.
To give one to someone would be giving them a slap. They’d wonder how they offended you. They’d expect the version that doesn’t just give you heart rate, blood pressure and petrol consumption, but also tells you if the Castle Lite barrel is colder than the Soweto Gold.
All I can do with this February version is admire it, which I do wholeheartedly.
Its crowning glory is that it’s circular: not only does the app find your keyring, your keyring finds your phone, which can’t fool you by being on silent. Your keyring emits the call of a homing pigeon and leads you to the wash basket, where the phone’s in the pocket of yesterday’s trousers.
This sort of experience leaves a guy high on technology’s miracles (and relieved that today is not washday). But it can also leave a hint of rancour, at technology getting too big for its boots.
I look up “app” on Google’s Word Timeline, which has read 500 billion words in 5 million books published over 200 years.
You can pick a word, any word, and it’ll show you, in a graph like a Drakensberg skyline, how common that word has been since 1800.
Here I whisper a secret Luddite confession: I suspect that thumbsuck creeps into this allegedly incorruptible science.
It shows you things you’d predict. For instance, “thou” has been on two centuries of downward slope. Then it shows you things you don’t believe, like that “thou” is having a big uptick in the 21st century.
Really? Have a lot of people called you “thou” lately?
The timeline of “app”, on the other hand, must rocket up a cliff-face right in our own time? No. Google says “app” was an Everest in 1920 and is now horizontal at Table Mountain level.
Nay, mense. That’s not possible. What is possible is a funny feeling of hooray, a blow for the human team.
You may say it’s primitive to be jealous of software, and I’ll agree. But I still – Confession 2 – felt primitive jubilance on trapping an algorithm making mistakes.
I wonder how long they’ll still make mistakes.
Yesterday, a friend showed me his new app, showing whether and for how long I had opened his attachments to me and how long I took writing my reply.
Would progress please call a halt now? Right at homing-keyring level would be fine.
* Beckett is a writer and journalist. His Stoep Talk column appears in The Star on Mondays and Fridays.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.