Monday, August 31, 2009

There's an app for that

Apple's iPhone commercials include the line "There's an app for that," which is a great slogan. But I figured it was just a bit of hype until I saw this post by Andy Ihnatko on his Celestial Waste of Bandwidth blog:
Okay. So you’re in a theater watching “Transformers 2″ and you desperately need to go to the bathroom. Yes, launching an iPhone app in the middle of a movie is not socially acceptable but neither is whizzing involuntarily right in your seat, so you go ahead and launch RunPee.

The app connects to a central site and sends you a list of all currently-playing movies. Tap “District 9″ and it displays a list of scene and line cues from that movie designating the start of a good moment to leave for the bathroom without missing anything important. A timer tells you how much time you have left before the movie starts getting interesting again and there’s a synopsis of any details you might have missed, to read on your walk back to the theater.

If this is an ongoing problem for you, and the phrase “Don’t buy the 72 ounce Dr. Pepper at the concession stand” never occurs to you, you can launch the app and tap a Start button when the movie begins. The app will tell you at a glance how many more minutes you’ll need to hold it until the next gap in the action.

This just might be the most brilliant thing ever.

I bet it won’t make it into one of Apple’s iPhone commercials, though.

(”Say you have a bladder-control problem that affects your ability to see a movie without wetting the seat. There’s an app for that.”)
See the full post here.

1 comment:

Sue Horner said...

What a great idea! You have to hand it to the people who come up with all these amazing apps - they think of everything!