Before I sat down to type this, I opened the fridge, looked up and down the shelves and their contents, frowned, sighed and closed it again. Then I opened the cupboard, scanned the pasta packets and the polpa tins, sighed and closed it again. Then I walked to the fridge again, opened it, and, Jesus, I made you doze off.
It’s called doing-anything-to-delay-sitting-down-and-start-work; or always-looking-for-that-something-to-nibble-but-I’m-never-sure-exactly-what; or simply, first-world-nervous-tick.
But now it seems I can be making better use of this knee-jerk crick: as I stand, nonplussed in front of the fridge and cupboard, I will soon be able to get the mobile out of my pocket and zap it up and down. Then, Siri, or whoever, will tell me: “Kris. Teenar. You. Have. All. Items. Necessary. To. Cook. Teampayna.”
Indeed, dear reader, we read in The Sunday Times of Malta last week that a new, upcoming app will itemise all the foodstuff in the house and tell us what lovely dishes we can whip up with them, including, according to the app creator, our beloved timpana.
The app will contain more than 400,000 recipes including some 40 for traditional Maltese food. By way of research, I opened the fridge again: there’s five Jogobella, a box of green grapes, a bag of basil and a box of ready-cut pumpkin. I wonder what KickDish would make of that. I suspect it will go: “Kris. Teena. Sigh.”
All this, of course, made me think of what other apps that inventors bent over their responsive screens, ought to invent for us.
How about an app which scans your kitchen and tells you which food is expired? Or an app which when you’re driving past any mini- or supermarket will remind you of the items you have missing at home, in manner of a mobile shopping list? Or one which would immediately start beeping the minute you scan a packed food item which has lots of additives?
Obviously, it’s not just food-related apps that we need. We could, say, do with an exercise reminder. I’m not saying a morning alarm going “Don’t forget your 6k run”. But rather a more personal and geophysical reminder. Let’s say if you’re walking through an empty stretch of space, the mobile in your pocket could start bleeping: “Quicken your step and you’ll burn 100 calories by the time you reach your destination.” It would optimise your surroundings to the maximum. For example, if you work, say, at Castille, and your bottom is of an obese disposition and you spend your day sitting on said bottom fiddling about on social media, then the app might go “Right, time for you to run up and down the Castille steps. Three hundred times. And no timpana for you, fatso.”
How about an app which scans your kitchen and tells you which food is expired?
We could also do with clothes-related apps. For example, you key in what type of event you are going to, the app scans your wardrobe and it gives you outfit options, complete with shoes and accessories. Also when you’re shopping, it would scan the clothes’ material and it would tell you to “move on” if the material of the dress you’re thinking of buying needs lots of ironing.
Or we could have a driving app. By means of a traffic congestion sensor, it would tell us to avoid this stagnated roundabout, this bypass, this backroad and guide us to our destination through, ahem, lovely country lanes. And we would all be back home in no time.
Will the future be app driven, I wonder? Some apps are really out of this world already. I am, for example, fascinated by Vio the music app that does magical things to your voice. Even if you can’t sing for the life of you, Vio has pitch correction technology, which means that anyone really can have a unique sound. Thanks to Vio, although I am not quite a Gillian Zammit, I could easily be mistaken for Ira Losco (audiowise only).
Much has been written about the digital future. Seventy-five-year-old author Patrick Tucker, even wrote The Naked Future: What Happens in a World That Anticipates Your Every Move? Most of the common predictions for the next decade seem to point to apps which would enable us to continuously monitor our health, make sure that everything from our diets to our workout regimens are on track.
Some gurus are suggestions that we’d be able to use an app to find out how our workday breaks down: how much time we spend answering e-mails, how often we collaborate with others, how long it takes us to walk to meetings and how much time we spend chatting with co-workers.
Maybe apps would not only be telling us what to eat and how we could be more fit, but also that we need to be kinder, more generous, more of teamworkers. Who knows, the world might turn out to be a truly better place, teampayna and all.
krischetcuti@gmail.com
Twitter: @KrisChetcuti