While all those apps take weeks or months to develop, I came up with yet another use for the iPad that took me all of three seconds to figure out.
When we came home from bowling yesterday morning, I noticed a small snake on the driveway of the condo building where we live.
A little over a foot long and being almost the color of concrete, Dieter had walked right past it, and I nearly stepped it, but just in time I noticed the snake and jumped aside in a way that would have made a ballerina jealous.
What to do with the snake? I couldn’t just leave it there. A car might drive over it, or a pedestrian might step on it, either way the snake wasn’t safe there.
While debating what to do with the little thing a woman joined us, wondering what we were looking at. When she saw the snake she flinched, a look of fear and disgust on her face.
“We’re wondering what to do with it,” I said.
“Squash it,” she suggested.
I didn’t think that was a good idea. The snake hadn’t done any harm and being outside she had just as much right to be there as anyone else. The logical conclusion was to move it.
“Pick it up and put it in the grass,” I said to Dieter.
When he bend down, I was quick to stop him. “Not with your bare hands,” I pointed out. “Use a tissue or a piece of paper or something.” Unfortunately, we had neither on us.
We did have a plastic bag though, so maybe that would do. Once again Dieter bend to pick up the snake with the plastic, but as soon as he touched the tail, the snake raised its tiny head. He tried again, and again the snake looked up to see what was going on back there.
Hm, we would have to rethink this.
And then it came to me ... “Use your iPad,” I said to Dieter. “Hold the pad next to the snake, let her sit on to it and then throw her in the grass.”
Dieter got his iPad out, held it close to the snake and encouraged by my foot she slithered onto the leather casing. Once the snake, from head to tail, was in position Dieter deposited it in the grass near a tree.
Voila, operation snake was a success.
As of June 2013, the iPad had 900,000 apps (375,000 native to the Pad) and I just invented app 900,001.