Apropos of nothing, this begins from the WordPress iPhone app. My son, who incidentally just turned 5, is wondering why this app does not appear to be “tilt-sensitive”. (I don’t think I knew what “tilt-sensitive” was until about 6 months ago.) He proceeded to ask me to find one for sale. (More on that at the end).
When my wife gave me the green light to buy the new iPhone 3Gs, her biggest concern was that it would distract me from the already-infrequent conversations we somehow rarely manage to have. Little did either of us know that it would indeed be just slightly less addictive than crack cocaine… to our child. I tried the angle of “this is daddy’s work phone, not yours”, which worked about as well as “this is my crack cocaine, not yours” would on a crack addict. I recalled my own childhood, some of the gadgets my dad used for work, and how it felt to want to play with them. His TI 55 and the science-fictionesque LED display caused indescribable yearnings to press all of the buttons all day long (even though I had no idea what any of those funny symbols meant). When he switched from a regular watch to one of these, I nearly lost my mind. And… let me catch my breath…. when a VIC 20 showed up on his work desk, that was it for the boundaries; I had to use it even if it meant being grounded for a week.
But none of it holds a candle to the “I am the blue team scoring champion and all of my teammates should touch my head for luck before I battle the red team scoring champion” app, which is not available on iTunes or from Texas Instruments or at Best Buy. I just saw it for the first time today, and it’s not for sale.