Apps We’d Like to See

A while ago, Ellie Guzman wrote “Future Movies” speculating on movies that she would like to see made:

I would have called that post, “Movies We’d Like to See.” There are a lot of things we’d like to see, right? If you can imagine a better world, then there are listicles upon listicles of “Things You’d Like to See.”

I have already written two of these posts: The entirely unsuccessful “Nicknames We’d Like to See,” (3 recs) and the moderately unsuccessful:

There are lots of other things I’d like to see. My list includes:

• Books We’d Like to See
• Paraphilias We’d Like to See
• Sports We’d Like to See

And

• Political Conventions We’d Like to See

I would let you vote on what you would like to see if I could put a poll on Medium. Did you notice that Medium put a poll on Medium??? Fuckers! I hate it when free sites hoard all of the cool functionality for themselves!

Because we can’t vote, I have to act as Tyrant. I’ve decided that what we’d like to see are apps, so here are…

Four Apps We’d Like to See

Name: WatchMeEat Category: Fitness Price: Whatever the market will bear

Description: Someone recently wrote that shame and guilt are useless emotions. I disagree. I get a lot done with shame, and if it weren’t for guilt I would never answer my father’s phone calls. In fact, I believe that shame and guilt can be harnessed for their transformative power.

When it comes to dieting there has long been this idea that it’s hard to overeat if you are eating naked in front of a mirror. I’ve experimented with this idea and discovered that it’s hard to overeat, but not impossible. The main reason that I don’t use this “naked in front of the mirror” technique more often is because it is impractical. I guess I could take my double quarter pounder with cheese into the McDonald’s bathroom, but I would have to blockade the door to avoid freaking someone out. If you blockade the door at our local McDonald's they assume you are shooting heroin, so they call the cops immediately. Blockading the door leads to being arrested, and not blockading the door will too. What’s a guy to do?

Technology can help. What if there was an app that allowed you to take a series of naked selfies and use them to construct a full body wireframe? It would be your own personal Eidolon. Then you could just enter “quarter pounder with cheese” or “bottomless bowl of pasta”, and the app would animate you eating the selected food naked. You could zoom in on your mouth, or watch your naked ass move up and down as you shake the Dorito bag above your head to inhale the last stream of Dorito dust. Watching that would have to have some impact on your appetite. I bet I lose 40 pounds in the first month.

Name: NickIt Category: Music Price: Some Amount More Than It Costs to Make and Market

Millennial readers can get off the fucking lawn right now because you’re not going to understand the need for this app. We’ll, maybe you can stick around because I need you as the supposed audience so that I can explain what I am talking about.

You see, in the old days we had these things called “phonographs” that played records. I know that you are aware of turntables and vinyl, but I never had a turntable. I had a record player and then a cheap Panasonic phonograph that was so slight and shitty that I had to tape a stack of nickels on the arm of the record player to keep the needle from skipping.

I bought a lot of records and ruined many of them on that shitty stereo, so when I went to transfer them to audio cassette I was saving for posterity a decade’s worth of abuse. Consequently, all of my tapes had these pops, skips, and nicks on them, but through repeated listening those sounds became integral to the music.

When I listen to Bob Dylan’s Tangled Up in Blue, I expect to hear a large pop after the line:

Working for a while on a fishing boat Right outside of Delacroix

Likewise, Jimi Hendrix’s Crosstown Traffic is supposed to jump from the second chorus to the middle of the next stanza. It sucks, but I like it better that way.

In these days of music-on-demand and streaming services the music no longer feels like it is my own. I admit that my scratchy version of For the Benefit of Mr. Kite sounded like shit. It sounded like shit because I put those scratches in it. Without them, it’s just another song in an infinite sea of music.

The NickIt app would allow you to customize songs to make them yours again. You know, if you’ve never had to get up and walk over to the phonograph because the record is skipping and endlessly repeating the words “here before” in CSNY’s Deja Vu, well, you’ve never really listened to Deja Vu have you?

Name: Weird Teen? Category: Social Networking Price: Free

Description: If you have a teenager, you know how much of your time is spent wondering “Is this normal?” How weird is it that my kid doesn’t want to get a driver’s license? How weird is it that he won’t eat potatoes, not even as French fries? Hey, he just called me a “fucking asshole.” I kind of remember calling my dad a “fucking asshole” behind his back, but I don’t think I ever said it to his face in quite that way. I mean, for the record, I was being a fucking asshole, but how weird is it that my kid just said that to me?

The “How Weird Is My Teenager” app lets you see your teenager compared to state, national, or worldwide averages by crowd-sourcing parent data that you yourself submit. It then displays the data in easy to understand charts and graphs after you input your teenagers information.

Name: What Wuz I Thinking? Category: Game Price: This one is going to cost, unless we can trick engineers into making it for us at a “hackathon”

Description: If you are still reading this far into the post it is probably because you are an app developer looking to steal some of these sweet, sweet ideas. You’re in luck. This next idea is up for grabs. Take it if you want.

You know when you have a thought and then you lose the thought and you can’t remember what you were thinking? I want to develop an app that can go into your head and remind you what you were thinking about!

Obviously, there is a steep technical climb here. I imagine it will have to be written in C++ or something. Maybe even “machine code.” I know a lot about software development… having had plenty of experience ‘hacking’ up high level scripting languages… and that experience really gives me the technical chops to ‘spitball’ ideas like this and then turn them over to the plumbers.

I know this sounds like it can’t be done, but programmers can do anything if you write your specification document correctly, and I’m really good at that.

Here, I even created what is known in the business as a software design “flowchart”. Check this out:

I think that’s enough for them to go on. Isn’t it? There was one more thing I wanted to say about this project but… oh, darn, I lost that thought. YOU SEE HOW BADLY WE NEED THIS?