Bernard O'Shea: Here's my top five phone apps
Bernard O'Shea.
I'm a digital magpie. I see shiny new life-changing cyber trinkets online, and I'm downloading them onto my device within minutes. More than often, I'm also offloading cash off my credit card.
Here's my usual app download procedure. I see something on the app store and think, "That will change my life". I use it for five minutes, and then I download the premium features. After all, I need the "premium" features. After two days of not using it, I frantically log in to my apple account and quash the recurring subscription. I don't even use the 7-day free trial. Probably, I wouldn't even use a 7-minute free trial.
This all reads like a digital dopamine weakling. But the truth lies somewhere between. The lengths that most companies go to understanding how we function as consumers online are comprehensive. We're visual creatures. Most of the apps are intuitive and pleasing to the retinas. Many of them promise you a better life, a new sharp brain, a six-pack and more money in your pocket, all from your phone. This has got to be too good to be true. It is.
However, there are five apps that I downloaded onto my phone and have used frequently all year.
I downloaded this back in January because we use it for the kids at night. Of all the meditation apps out there, I found this covers everything from age groups to categories of meditation and my personal favourite focus music. With three small ones in the house, sometimes it's near impossible to get any work done. But it's incredible what a set of noise-cancelling headphones and a bit of deep trance music can do. Although sometimes, I feel like it's 3am at Electric Picnic, which isn't bad. I can only daydream being damp and rambling aimlessly around fields in Stradbally again. The downside Headspace requires a subscription to get the most out of it.
I came across this one while researching online about a local hike near me. It has a massive amount of guided walks for you to explore. It's also loaded with pictures of hikes and walk, so you're familiar with the area before you arrive. I found it really useful because I was getting to know a new area. I would often forget that if you walk for two hours in one direction, you have to crawl back for two hours in the same direction again. You can also use the inbuilt filter to make a bespoke activity for yourself. The best bit about this activity app is its "navigate" function. If you are fed up with walking in the same place every day, it will navigate you to a new ramble. The biggest reason why I've kept this one is that it locates walks a half an hour from your house that I would of usually never known or heard about.
I have subscriptions to every imaginable screen shrive on the plant. I'm still trying to get used to the kids saying, "Dad turn on Disney" or roaring across the room, "Dad Free Rein is on Netflix, not Prime". The days of having one, two, three and four are truly gone. But I use one streaming service I watch nearly as much as the other big players, and that's the TG4 app. Full confession I'm not great on the Irish, but all of their homegrown docs have subtitles. But hidden in this little gem is a Nordic Noir section. I'm currently watching "Borgen" and a plethora of GAA club games. I'm thinking of writing a dark noir drama on the perils of playing Junior B football with two bad knees.
This app is the longest "on-off" relationship I've ever had. MyFitnessPal is basically one of the most used calorie counting apps on the market. You can also add your exercise, and it will churn out the equivalent caloric output. This provides me with a never-ending saga of trying to beat what goes in my mouth versus how much I'm willing to move that day. There is a debate over the calorie as a unit of measurement, and many weight-loss experts advise against counting calories. However, there are days when I enter what I've eaten, and I'm three times over the daily requirement. I find it useful as a reality check. Who knew that a tub of Häagen-Dazs salted caramel and two frozen pizzas weren't a good food choice?
I was never into video games unless you call my obsession circa 2002 with the game "snake" on the Nokia 3310, and that was a lost year. There are thousands of free online games for iPhone and Android. You can build empires, race at Le Mans and spend your afternoons fighting a zombie apocalypse, or you could try and beat your phone at draughts. Unlike playing with my sisters when I was a bored kid, no one will move the pieces while telling you, "Is that Mammy calling you?" I've relinquished the idea that I'll ever learn chess. Draughts are my game of choice or, as a friend once called them, "The pitch and putt to golf of board games". The only issue I have is that I'm probably spending a bit too much time trying to move up to the advanced level.
I wonder, is there an app that stops you from playing online games?
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