A terrible, sad and cruel thing happened to me this morning. In an attempt to get a quick caffeine fix, I grabbed my last can of energy drink and just as I was about to open it, the ring snapped off with the can remaining firmly closed. Oh, the horror!
At first, I tried replicating what the ring does by pushing on the same part of the can with the handle of a spoon. That didn’t work. Then I did the same thing again, except this time I tried hitting the handle with a meat mallet instead of pushing it down with my finger. That didn’t work either. Then I considered making a hole in the can with a knife, but decided against it at the last moment, as I really wasn’t in the mood for some early morning bleeding. It wasn’t until 5 minutes later, with the can back in the refrigerator, that I thought of the solution.
What do you use, when you’re dealing with an unopened can? A can opener, of course! It worked beautifully.
In retrospect, it all seems silly. But at that time, the connection between a malfunctioning can of energy drink and a can opener wasn’t clear to me at all, as I had never thought of opening a drink this way.
And normally, this would be it. I would fill my system with caffeine and go about my daily life without blogging about it. Except, this is not the only time something like this happened to me over the weekend.
While commenting on Daniel Appelquist’s predictions for 2009 the other day, I described myself as someone who had only recently developed interest in mobile. Which is completely false.
I wrote my first (and only) WAP pages using WML back in 2000. If you never created anything using WML, you should be glad, as you saved yourself some completely wasted time. That attempt at creating a separate mobile markup language was a long walk down a dead end street to nowhere. Then, at one point, I worked on an SMS based quiz. People would send in a message to start the quiz, to which the system would respond by sending them a question, and if they answered correctly, they would be entered into a drawing for prizes. I even bought a book titled “Learning wireless Java”, downloaded the J2ME SDK and created some MIDlets.
But all of this didn’t come to mind. Because that was the old idea mobile.
Mobile today is not about SMS messages and sandboxed Java applets anymore. It’s about native Android and iPhone apps; it’s about beautiful design; it’s about mobile web, AJAX, web apps that look and behave like native apps; it’s about bigger screens, location awareness, voice recognition, augmented reality, and I could go on and on and on.
Today’s idea of mobile is so different in fact, that I completely failed to make a mental connection between it and my experience with the old idea of mobile.
So, if you are a web person (like me), who spent the last decade thinking that maybe you should get into mobile, don’t worry, as you haven’t missed anything. If you are someone who spent the last decade only in mobile, on the other hand, you probably missed a lot.
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