Friday, January 21, 2011

Personal life window...

Of course the iPad is all about the apps. I remember when I bought it the apple guy said, "you're are all set, now you just have to keep filling it with apps." Although I mostly blog and draw on it, I do cruise the apps store on a regular basis. There are so many apps that do everything from useful to useless it is hard to know what to down load and what not to bother with; but for ninety-nine cents it is hard not to exercise a bargain curiosity. Some of apps I've bought have been used exactly twice. Once when I first downloaded it, and a second time when I showed Sandi how cool it was. After receiving her agreement, I usually have no use for it's functions.

So when my friend Marsha showed up for coffee with her iPad it became a seminar of "what are your cool apps?" She turned me on to some really great ones. One of the most interesting is a speedometer. It is just that. Using the gps chip in the iPad it reads and looks just like the speedometer in you car and registers distance and speed, I put it in the car and leaned it against Radio. It was just as accurate as the BMW dashboard. I could easily have used it instead of the one installed.

Here is what I am thinking with Bluetooth tech, we could hook all kinds of information to the ipad which could essentially become our personal instrument panel. Like the screens in Star Trek sick bay, our personal read out could include our heart rate, blood pressure, temp, blood sugar, UV levels, distance traveled, altitude, and a million other checks on what our body is doing at every moment. You could bring your personal control panel to a doctor's appointment, and the doctor could access the stored results to see how you have been during the times between appointments. Perhaps figure out that certain places or heights are not healthy for you.

I told Marsha it is like the Dick Tracey wrist radio/ television communicator has now become a reality but even more amazing. (Probably only to those of use who actually remember Dick Tracey form the Sunday paper color funny pages.) I'm glad to be around watching, analyzing and app- ing my way into a brave new world. I just wish our politics and national dialogue would advance so easily and beneficially. We still seem to be practicing 18th century government. With all this 21st century abilities.
As you were,
Jay

1 comment:

P. Grecian said...

What a great idea. Surely they're developing it even as we speak (?)
I remember Dick Tracy. Read it faithfully. It pretty much jumped the shark with the whole Moon Maid thing, but in its heyday it was wonderful.
I was telling someone just the other day that, when I was a kid, one of my playmates got a Dick Tracy Wrist Radio set for Christmas. There were two "wrist radios," each about as big as a snack pack cereal box--with a strap.
And there was, perhaps, twenty-five feet of wire connecting them. You could easily have shouted your message to the other guy...but still, they were the best technology available to us at the time, and we thought we were pretty cool using them.
NOW we do everything with iPads and cell phones the size of TicTac boxes.
No wires.
Amazing.