6 new phone apps for old IT pros

I think that mobile phones are one of the best technical inventions of the age. However, I am also one of those individuals who think that they should ONLY be necessary for actually making phone calls, or occasionally doing email and even less occasionally used for the odd text message (say one-per-month).

I have never been a big user of the so-called mobile phone 'apps', although I have actually written a couple of business ones myself over the past couple of years. Given this typical Geezer Geek attitude, imagine my surprise when I did some research into the current crop of software products, especially those designed for IT Professionals.

I found some that I actually think might be useful and here is the collection of 'must-have' apps that I stumbled upon. To the best of my knowledge, they are available for download on all of the many (and unnecessarily so!) mobile phone operating systems :

TeenTalk - Designed for the parents of today's idiot-teenager to help communicate with your offspring. Simply get them to speak into your phone in the gibberish that they use with their friends, and it will translate their limited verbal skills into understandable English. Equally useful the other way, when you can speak into the phone as any normal human being would, and the TeenTalk app will generate the appropriate rubbish. However, there are two problems inherent with this app; when a teenager talks into the phone, only on rare occasions does anything meaningful ever come out the other end. Similarly, whenever an adult speaks into the phone, the only three words that ever seem come out the other end are 'like', 'duh' and 'whatever'. A similar application, 'Dog Talk' is available for our canine friends, and actually seems to be more productive in interspecies communication than is TeenTalk.

What is that character called?

If you look around your keyboard, you will notice a number of keys with characters on that you may not know the name of. In this post I will tell you the most common names for those esoteric characters. I am only looking at those characters that appear on my UK qwerty keyboard. I will explore those special characters and symbols that don't appear on the keyboard in future posts.

¬
This is called 'not' and is most commonly used in propositional logic and mathematics. It may not appear on all keyboards.

¦ and |
'Vertical bar' or 'pipe' is used in mathematics and computer programming. It can be 'broken' or 'unbroken' as shown.

^
'Caret' a.k.a 'hat', 'wedge' and 'chevron' is used in mathematics, logic, computing and to indicate ordinals in Italian.

~
'Tilde' is used in a variety of ways, such as indicating an approximation as well as the usual suspects: mathematics, logic and computing.