App Dream

by Jens Alfke ⟿ February 6, 2014

I’m at a computer lab [probably the one from college] and have written an entire email client app in a day. I’m excitedly showing it off to everyone. It’s kind of glitchy but I can pull up my real emails, including spam.

The app is also, simultaneously, made out of a 2-liter soda bottle. It starts out crushed, and expands and fills with water as it launches. Unfortunately there are some cracks that water squirts out of. I explain that I am going to patch them soon.

People are pretty impressed that I wrote this in a day, but I point to some fat binders lying on the desk and tell them that I have a bunch of libraries I wrote earlier that helped me build the app.

(Inspirations: Obviously there’s the social network app I want to write that I posted about a few days ago. A friend asked me yesterday how it was coming. Also yesterday, Jed in fact wrote a pretty decent Tetris game in one day on the iMac. Plus, obvious visual pun about “memory leaks”. And I’m increasingly frustrated with the poor quality of Apple’s Mail app on 10.9 and wouldn’t mind a replacement, though I’m not really going to write my own.)