Is there an app for that?

3rd November 2016

Joe Bush

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What do you do at lunchtime? Sandwich at the desk? Pie and a pint down the pub? I stroll down to my local café and read the paper while eating chips with something. And quite pleasant that is too. However, somebody has decided that people who eat lunch alone cannot possibly be happy and so they have invented an app called Never Eat Alone.

The idea is that it helps you find someone else at work with whom to go to lunch. This is the sort of app that should die naturally, but the Elior Group has decided to help the start-up go global. Expect it on a smartphone near you soon.

However, the question this raises is whether there is anything for which someone has not yet invented an app. Somehow I doubt it, but if you have some unusual ideas please email me at steve@steverogerson.com and I will publish the most unusual ideas in a future column. Though I may browse through them first while I enjoy my lunch alone at the café.

Anne Hanrahan from E.On has written to me saying that the utility wants to give me a free smart meter. The information though is pretty scant. Nothing at all about the model and make of smart meter it is planning on installing, so I can’t even look it up to see what I am getting. It does say it will let the utility read my meter automatically, but not how. Will it be power-line communications, some local network or is it going to use my phone line or internet connection? I think I will ignore the letter for now.

Gem Motoring Assist has issued a warning to drivers to beware as deer mating season has arrived and that means the deer may be too occupied to look both ways before crossing the road. Maybe they should invent a new red triangle sign showing two deer getting friendly with each other. Then again, that may lead to more accidents due to driver distraction. I wonder if the makers of self-driving cars have programmed bonking deer into the software yet.

I have always been taught to avoid jargon in my writing, but obviously when writing for technical magazines you have to assume the readership is familiar with basic technical terminology. However, if writing for a more general audience then such terms need proper explanation. A recent survey by Sky Betting & Gaming suggests that maybe this needs to go even further as it found that seven out of a hundred people could not identify terms such as ‘blogging’, ‘spam’, ‘3G’ and ‘world wide web’. I suppose one answer would be to give them an app that lets them look up these terms, but first you would have to explain what an app was.