Heritage app

English Heritage have an app.  This is hardly a surprise.  Many organisations have apps, and not just organisations but companies and while it is quite understandable that large stores have apps that let you, for instance, find your nearest branch of Woolies or whatever, surely it’s about time that somebody invented an app to locate places that want to be KFC, but aren’t quite as classy.  Indeed apps are becoming so commonplace that it can’t be long before every shop everywhere has an app, not just to let you locate where the only branch of that store is, but guide you to the products within that store.

So, stuck in Chipping Camden and looking for porn and pie?  Fire up your Chipping Camden News app, locate Chipping Camden News, situated between the bookies and the bank, top shelf for gentleman’s literature and back of the shop for the Ginster’s and the microwave.  Job done.

And why stop at shops?  Surely people should have their own app, and not just celebrities, but everyone.  An app for the bloke in the street could mesh together their mobile, their facebook status and their twitter feed so you could see where they were, what they were doing and what they thought about it, all the time.  Colin Fanshaw App: Location: Chipping Camden, Newsagents, feeling horny and hungry, is there an app for that?  Luckily for Colin, yes, yes there is.

The English Heritage app has a feature where you can see where you are in Britain (a great feature at any time, especially if you use ‘pubfinder’ a lot) and suggest days out.  Some of them are substantial, for instance a visit to a stately home, with a car park, a gift shop and everything.  Others are more…surprising, shall we say.  They are still sites that are owned and operated by English Heritage but some of them, at least from the photographs and descriptions, look indistinguishable from, for instance, a field.

Take flint mines.  Now, you might think that a bloody big hole in the ground with a barrier up around it to prevent unwanted plunging is merely an interesting geographical feature.  But you’d be missing three things. 

Firstly, a couple of thousand years ago, primitive man (heavy of brow and with a beard, like that bloke in the Joy of Sex illustrations but actually wearing a loincloth) took a deer antler down a hole and started chipping flint out of the wall.  Of course, once he had chipped enough flint, he could tie the flint to the antler and use that to chip flint.  And as soon as he put the fire in his beard out, primitive man discovered a) chipping flint creates sparks and b) health and safety regulations, which lead directly to the invention of the goggle.

It also meant that he could wander over to the next village and beat the shit out of those backwards morons still using just antlers as weapons.  And so the stone age and the arms race was born.

Secondly, you’d be missing the laminated sign telling you all this, but with added fact and a lot less speculation.  However, I concede that there would probably a fat bloke in a cagoule blocking your view of the sign.

Finally, you’d be missing the car park.  The car park serves two purposes, the first being somewhere to leave your vehicle (or more likely to have a cheese sandwich and cup of tea in your vehicle while waiting for the rain to stop), the second as a community amenity or, as the Daily Mail calls it, a ‘dogging blackspot’.

It’s amazing just how many sites English Heritage have, including one which is a barn.  That’s right, a barn.  Oh, it’s Elizabethan and everything, but I have to take issue with any ‘day out’ that involves me stepping over a pile of horseshit to buy a fridge magnet from the gift shop.

Of course what’s really required is an integrated app that locates various interrelated services, so that one can increase one’s knowledge of British history, then eat some fried chicken before finishing the day with a decent pint and that particular heritage snack – the pork scratching.

Valet app

Why did Apple include a feature on their last iPhone that was supposed to be a robotic personal assistant?

The answer may be that they were trying to integrate the personal organiser functions on their telephone using an interface that saved you from having to flip from feature to feature to try and find out the simplest local information, or remember your dry cleaning, or your mother's birthday. In other words, they spent millions of dollars developing an application on their gadget to replace the Yellow Pages, or a diary, or a post it note, or a conscience. Or some basic sentient being skills like remembering.

This was presumably because the cognitive energy otherwise needed to remember that you are meeting Simon for cocktails at five on Tuesday can be instead channeled either to work on your next oh-so-droll tweet, or vigerously deny that binging on spirit-based drinks early on a Tuesday afternoon is evidence of alcoholism.

Selling a voice recognition package as some sort of personal assistant went well beyond the obvious reason why Apple may have done this; to make iPhone users' relationship with their iPhones even more unhealthy, reaching the point where the dependency is actually a recognised medical condition that The Metro can publish articles and Channel 5 can screen sensationalist documentaries about.

So perhaps the real reason was the economy and Downton Abbey.

Downton Abbey cut right through any doubts whatsoever that Britain ever had a chance of becoming, in John Major's term, a classless society. Britain bloody loves being a class-structured society. We love it so much that we recently invented a whole new class - 'under' - to meet increasing demand to have somebody to look down on. It's like the Indian caste system but without decent railways. Downton Abbey's success, penetrating the nation's consciousness like a sex toy in a novel that sells well on Kindle, demonstrated that we know our place. It's in front of the TV at nine o'clock on a Sunday night.

Two things unite Downton Abbey viewers, they all think they are at least one social class higher than they actually are, and all of them think their life would be a whole lot easier if they lived in a stately home and had an army of servants to iron their pyjamas.

That's why Apple produced an interactive feature on their 'phone, because having something that reminds us that we are due at the pox clinic tomorrow, or that we have forgotten to pickup our dry cleaning, again, is the closest that most people are going to get to having staff. Even the gripes about the voice recognition was a deliberate feature, as it allowed people to complain about the staff (it also gave long term Apple gadget users a warm glow of satisfaction, they have been moaning about Apple's interfaces for years, like the handwriting recognition on the Newton. Long term users consider recent adopters nouveau riche).

But the economy being what it is, the middle classes can't afford to retain servants any more, though that doesn't mean that they don't want them, if only to fire.

What's needed is to confront this thing head on and model the interactive features on the iPhone 5 like a traditional country house. This means that instead of having one feature that does everything a bit crap and can't understand you if you have a speech impediment, like a lisp or working class accent, it has lots of apps with different specialist functions.

Surely it can't be that difficult to interface the iPhone's camera with a valet app that could archly criticise both your grooming and your lifestyle with pithy comments, all the while maintaining a faintly camp and slightly sinister tone? A simple click of the shutter, some diagnostics and the phrase 'sir is pleased to jest' will alert you to a potentially shaming sock/tie combination.

Certainly such an app is needed. While the erosion of the servant classes may have resulted in a removal, at least superficially, of some class barriers, it also means men's grooming has reached the point where an association football shirt is considered suitable attire, the away kit being deemed 'formal'.

G&P Awards - Science and Technology

Innovation of the year – iSay! There was much excitement in the offices of G&P when ‘smartphones’ where introduced. This excitement was diminished when one actually started using one. They did not, it appears, automatically mute themselves during Opera. Nor did they automatically ring with an urgent, not to be ignored tone during the interminable second act of ‘De Fingermaus’, allowing one to slip away from the box and test the service at the bar. Worst of all, they did not self-erase browsing history or scramble text messages from annoyed mistresses. What, was the collective opinion, is so f**king smart about that? This all changes with the introduction of ‘apps’, an acronym of A Perfect Procrastination Solution, they are indeed supreme at wasting time. Previously, the staff of G&P thought angry birds were the ones one clipped but did not kill on a shoot, instead it turns out to be either a way for your sullen child to while away that difficult lunch when you tell him he can’t come home from Christmas after all because Daddy’s new wife does not like the way he looks at her in the hot tub, or you to while away the time during any meeting featuring a powerpoint slide with the word ‘vision’ on it. Occasionally though, there is a useful app. Such an app is iSay. iSay is an English translation app. Unlike other translation apps, that spits out tinny mechanised unintelligible versions of ‘can you show me the way to the nearest lavatory that features a Sturley and Armington flush mechanism’ and other phrases that one clearly needs abroad, it turns your phone into a PA system while at same time printing the message, dot matrix style, on the screen. So for instance, if one types in ‘would you mind awfully advising me where the railway station is please?’ it turns it into English Abroad: ‘WHERE. IS. RAILWAY. STATION!’ Now, this is doing nothing one cannot do oneself, but the clever bit is if one is having trouble being understood, one hits ‘repeat’ and gets, in this instance: ‘RAILWAY. STATION.’ ‘CHUFF CHUFF, YOU KNOW, THAT WE BUILT’ ‘Oh for fuck’s sake’. And thence on to the inevitable scuffle, local law enforcement involvement and appearance of British consulate. The G&P staff have used this in Wales and found it most effective.