Absolute BS

The iPhone is a great, magical, revolutionary device. I owned first-gen one for 2 years and loved everything about it (except AT&T). I think it’s great how many apps are out, and how much emphasis the platform has put on software development in general. Without the iPhone I’m sure my Nexus One wouldn’t even exist.

However.

Shaq released an iPhone app today: The Shaq App. The entire point, as far as I can tell, is to watch shaq’s twitter feed. There are about a thousand ways you could have done that already, the easiest of which is going to his twitter page. There is no reason for this.

But Shaq is rich. And social. If he wants to pay somebody to write The Shaq App, that’s fine by me. What spurred this post was a spam I got from contacts.com with this in it:

“Our new LensGauge™ iPhone App makes it easy. It prompts you when to change your contact lenses. It maintains all pertinent information about your contacts. And it makes re-ordering a snap.”

This LensGauge ™ app is so dumb it is hard for me to properly articulate it. It is dumber than the fart app(s). It is dumber than the “I am Rich” app. It is maybe even dumber than The Shaq App. From the reviews on that page, it sounds like it doesn’t even work (how that is possible is beyond me).

This isn’t new. Lots of companies seem to be “promoting their brand” through “new business channels” by “having a presense” on a “social platform.”

So listen up, all you pillars of industry. You probably don’t need an iPhone app. If your best idea for an iPhone app can be used at most once a year, you definitely don’t need one. If it doesn’t do more than your website, just make your website work on mobile devices. If you just yearn for virtual friends to “like” you, go get a facebook page or open a twitter account. If all you desire is to be “social,” you should probably quit your job, because you are terrible at it.

The iPhone isn’t Facebook, although with 100,000 apps its starting to get pretty close.

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I’m sitting here trying to debug a very complex piece of “meta” code. This code generates web forms that have fields that automatically show/hide based on the selections in other fields. It’s usually very nice to work in, and it makes creating dynamic forms easy, but it is insanely complex under the hood. I finally find the source of the bug is a hip, railsey, ruby one-liner. It’s not to hard to figure out what that line does (adds some kind of prefix to each key). However I have no idea why it would do that. Luckily when I wrote this code I knew this was confusing, so I included a comment:


if (@if)
#in case this is being rendered in a subsection, the key
@if.each {|andor, array| array.each {|h| h[:key] = field_name_prefix + h[:key] }}
end


Except I forgot to finish it. The key…. the key….. WHAT ABOUT THE KEY YOU IDIOT?? This is the worst comment I’ve ever written. It is worse than no comment. No comment wouldn’t have got my hopes up….and then crushed them. Why isn’t it lunch time yet?