Although phone apps and the like can sometimes be remarkably helpful at translating language or any number of other things, they can’t do everything… yet. This is a mildly whimsical thread for apps which don’t yet exist but would be very helpful.
I’d like to see Shazam for Smells. Yes, that is paprika. Yes, you smelt it but you dealt it.
I’d also like to see Shazam for Women. Suzy was made in 1978 in Vancouver, is vegetarian, politically moderate and likes hockey.
I’d also like to be able to take a picture of food and get an ingredient list and nutritional profile.
And an app to measure honesty and list ulterior motives. Last time I went to a mall in the US, a lady shilling moisturizer claimed it contained ground up diamonds. I’m sure she didn’t mean something like sand, since that’s a terrible moisturizer.
A browser plugin that looks at “news” links and looks for Twitter content, and then determines whether the “news” “article” is just finding 2-3 random anonymous malcontents and writing a story restating their complaints.
Spectral analysis app, that can tell you what a substance is and the percentages of whats in it.
Soil analysis app.
Fact checking app for Google News, that catalogs the writer of the stories so you can see their “untruthful ratio”.
An app that takes those spam callers, the Keller Williams caller telling me that someone wants to move to my area and buy my house (that I fuckin’ rent because all you people keep moving to my area and paying cash for the houses I try to put contracts on then try to rent them out to me) and gives them instant death or something.
A successful/unsuccessful ratio generating app that rates doctors on the quality of their diagnoses.
An app thats rated to show accurately how fast you were going in a log file with GPS stamp and time and date, so when bad cops pull people over for bogus speeding tickets because its the first of the month, you can prove in court that you weren’t speeding. Thank god I don’t need this anymore, but when I lived in Texas everyone I knew, kid to old lady, used to get pulled over at least once a week for bogus tickets. Getting them thrown out in court was a real hassle, but we usually won after taking a day off of work and losing pay to go fight the ticket.
There are others, but I can’t think of any right now.
The most important “app” thing I would love is a flip phone that sync’s to my iPhone. I hate talking, texting, and general phone shit on this iPhone I have to have for work. I am much more productive with a dumb phone, and the batteries last forever. Since I have to use these stupid ass applications for work that don’t even work well, I am stuck with this stupid ass iPhone. It would be way better if I could use it for the two things I have to use it for and have the little flip phone for the phone and texting stuff.
A one time, emergency use flare app. When all else has failed, push the secret code, and throw it as high as you can as it goes off in a burst of light
They make fairly small spectrometers, the catch is $$$$.
Some dashcams do this, though I don’t know what kind of information as I turn off any GPS features in case it gets used against me. I don’t speed or anything as a habit.
Amazon Prime already does this, though it’s by scene, so you have to figure out which of the half dozen actors is which. It also identifies the song playing in the scene.
I don’t personally need this for myself, but an app that can detect when you’ve had too much to drink, that then won’t let you pay for anything bar a taxi/uber, or maybe a kebab. No ebay, no more booze. If it can disable your car for the night as well, that’d be great.
A “What are they building” app that uses your gps and maps to tell you what is being built when you see something under construction.
A “What’s going around” app that collects data from local minute clinics to show you how many recorded cases of X were diagnosed that week. If you feel like crap and wonder why you could see that 50 cases of the common cold were diagnosed in your zip code recently and these are the symptoms people were reporting.
I want something that keeps track of everything I’ve ever watched, so when I recognize an actor on some random episode of Law and Order, it lets me know where I’ve seen them before. Or tells me “You’ve never seen anything with this actor, but you’re probably confusing him with this similar looking actor.”
I want an app that is smart enough to understand what I’m doing in tedious file-renaming sessions and do it for me. (Things too complicated for wildcards or a template.)
