There are lots of people spending enormous amounts of time making apps that help us run our lives more efficiently. Like the new app Dunkin’ Run (US only) – which obliterates wasting a half hour walking around the office gathering coffee and tea orders and making chit chat. The idea is, you use the Dunkin’ Run app to send out an alert to your friends. Then they log on to dunkinrun.com and place their coffee orders, which are then sent to your iPhone. So you and the donut shop have record of the order, and no one forgets the double sugar!
Convenient, yes, but what are the possibilities of an app like this? An app that alerts, initiates action, then gathers information, putting you in motion, saving time, avoiding idle chatter. Pretty soon, we’ll have iPhone apps that remind us to pay the bills, go to the dentist, and visit with our mothers. We’ll program our lives through our phone, tossing our paper daytimers out the window. Already you can adjust your household thermostat, pre-heat your oven, start your car, track flight arrivals and spy on your babysitter, all in a matter of minutes. And although it is possible to read bedtime stories to our kids using Skype on our iPhone, is that going too far? What the iPhone will never achieve is that feeling of warmth as you hug your child after a long day. There will never be an app for that.
As for organizing and streamlining our worklives and managing household tasks, iPhone apps are already proving extremely useful.
Mashable has some great lists of iPhone apps here http://mashable.com/category/iphone-lists/
Katy
Tags: app, household, iPhone, time management
