LabKitty Apps #4: Famous Last Words

LabKitty Apps is a recurring LabKitty feature in which I describe one of my app ideas that I've finally accepted I'm never going to develop because I'm too busy or too dumb to figure it out. But that doesn't mean it can't help someone else become a billionaire. If you successfully bring a LabKitty App to market, LabKitty, like Erlich Bachman, owns 10%.

If was the best of times, it was the worst of times. More to the point, it was the time I conceived Famous First Words, the rare LabKitty App that actually made it as far as prototyping (after I purchased an ADP license and Erica Sandun's excellent iPhone Developer's Cookbook. Oh, and a 32-bit Intel MacBook, which is required to run the iPhone SDK. Which Apple then promptly stopped supporting. Cats above, how many laptops do I have to buy from you rat bastards? Is five not enough? No, come back! I'm sorry. I still love you Apple. I'll tell the girls at the office I walked into a door) before getting smothered in its crib.

The idea of FFW is as simple as it was doomed. Comb through a collection of great works of literature and have the app show the opening line of one chosen at random. For example: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." (That's from Pride and Prejudice, ya savages.) Or: "In a hole in the ground lived a Hobbit." (The Hobbit) Or: "See the child." (Blood Meridian) Display the text on a tastefully accented background, perhaps surrounded by bunting or Hoeffler symbols, and sell the thing for $0.99 on the app store. Boom! Instant millionaire.

Then the wheels came off.

LabKitty Apps #3: xBetween

LabKitty Apps is a recurring LabKitty feature in which I describe one of my app ideas that I've finally accepted I'm never going to develop because I'm too busy or too dumb to figure it out. But that doesn't mean it can't help someone else become a billionaire. If you successfully bring a LabKitty App to market, LabKitty, like Erlich Bachman, owns 10%.

Some things are most easily described as what they are not. For example: LabKitty is not a dessert topping. Alternatively, borrowing from vector algebra, we may describe a thing using a cross product, analogous to how the vector cross product defines a new direction in terms of two existing ones. For example: LabKitty is like a cross between a Ph.D. and a fever dream.

LabKitty Apps #3: USez

LabKitty Apps is a recurring LabKitty feature in which I describe one of my app ideas that I've finally accepted I'm never going to develop because I'm too busy or too dumb to figure it out. But that doesn't mean it can't help someone else become a billionaire. If you successfully bring a LabKitty App to market, LabKitty, like Erlich Bachman, owns 10%.

My mother, who is insane, prints every email she gets. I have many times tried to explain this is not necessary, that it rather defeats the purpose of email, that the "e" in "email" stands for "electronic," that it cuts against the jib of the paperless office philosophy, that the nice folks at Juno employ unpaid interns who nightly make backup copies of every missive she receives in some windowless server farm in the Calcutta suburbs. All for naught. She has a reason for printing her emails that is beyond the reach of reason.

LabKitty Apps #2: Zork-flavored Instructional Software

LabKitty Apps is a recurring LabKitty feature in which I describe one of my app ideas that I've finally accepted I'm never going to develop because I'm too busy or too dumb to figure it out. But that doesn't mean it can't help someone else become a billionaire. If you successfully bring a LabKitty App to market, LabKitty, like Erlich Bachman, owns 10%.

Many years ago, when LabKitty was just a LabKitten, computer games were text based. You played them by gathering around a teletype in the back of a ginormous windowless room housing a PDP-10 and enough air conditioning to turn the Sierra Madre into permafrost, usually after the normals left for the weekend and you got a stern lecture from the IT guy about the gruesome death everyone will experience should anyone trip the halon and, no, I don't care if it was an accident or not.

The hot title of the day was Zork, an adventure game in which you took on the persona of an intrepid adventurer and adventured forth seeking adventure. It was sort of Skyrim without graphics, or sound, or any kind of interaction beyond typed words. Skyrim played by someone in another room, and all you do is communicate with them via text messages.

Introducing LabKitty Apps! (Also: LKA #1 -- The Bon Scott Device)

LabKitty Apps is a recurring LabKitty feature in which I describe one of my app ideas that I've finally accepted I'm never going to develop because I'm too busy or too dumb to figure it out. But that doesn't mean it can't help someone else become a billionaire. If you successfully bring a LabKitty App to market, LabKitty, like Erlich Bachman, owns 10%.

Now that Congress has declared it's not going to be paying NASA to research climate change, or think about climate change, or let anyone say the words "climate change" anymore (we're saved!), presumably there's a whole herd of NASA engineers with mortgage payments looking for new career opportunities. (One can't help be reminded of the time the Indiana legislature voted to change the value of pi to 3. Circles stubbornly continued to use the old value. Perhaps there's some kind of lesson here. Let's move on before we figure out what that might be.)

The good news. unemployed engineers, is the private sector needs your mad DSP skills to construct the Bon Scott Device.

What is the BSD, you ask?

That is a reasonable question.