Review(?): Ocarina iPhone app
Even though it’s been out for more than a year now, I’ve resisted the urge to buy an iPhone (this hasn’t been easy), but I recently had the opportunity to borrow one from work for a couple of weeks to get a better, longitudinal feel for how it works as an everyday phone (as opposed to a fancy iPod, or standalone app-player).
Getting things set up, one of the first applications I downloaded was called Ocarina. For those of you who aren’t up to speed on ancient wind instruments and who never played The Legend of Zelda as a child, an ocarina is basically a flute: you blow into it and cover/uncover holes to make sounds.
I downloaded this app because:
- I heard someone talk about it previously, and it sounded kind of cool, and
- It was the first application staring me in the face when I opened up the app store on the iPhone, and
- It was only $0.99. Are you freakin’ kidding me? That’s like five Munchkins. Or a quarter-latte. I can go day without.
I’ve played with the app probably for a total of half-and-hour and have found it fun, engaging, easy-to-use. The map view is especially compelling to me.
This post isn’t actually so much a review of the application itself, how it works, how it looks, it’s features. There are plenty of good reviews of that nature already out there on the web. And this isn’t really a commentary on how popular it’s become or why, shooting to the #1 selling app after only being in the store for a week. There’s a great analysis over at TechCrunch for why this is so.
Instead of delving into that level of detail, I just wanted to take a step back and convey a vague, intangible sense of holy shit the future is here and it is fucking incredible.
A couple of years ago, this would have been a pretty impressive conceptual art / new media project for some university student.
A decade ago, probably the realm of technology research labs. Do-able, certainly, but requiring specialized equipment and not at all scaleable. And not on a mobile device.
A century ago, this would have been lumped into notions of a shiny, metallic future along with flying cars and personal robot servants.
Further back than that …. wizardry?
Even with the magic of the internet that we have come to take as a commodity: the ability to shift time and place, to talk with anyone, anywhere in the world, at any time, or to call up any minutiae of information in a fraction of a second …. this teeny little bundle of Cocoa code still evokes in me an immediate and visceral sense of wonder and amazement.
Fry plays the Holophoner in Futurama
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