I’m sure hearing about how a application within your iphone saved somebodies life, isn’t something you hear every day, I mean they have been plenty of stories about people being trapped, kidnapped and what have you, then they’ve been able to use their mobile phone to send a SMS message or a phone call to be rescued or whatever, but seriously, iphone applications saving life’s?
Well yes, it’s true, I mean iPhone’s aren’t called “Smart Phones” for no reason, there are a couple of different examples on how iPhone’s have saved life’s from their release Life Story App
, of course it’s not really down to Apple, more down the application programmers who created the app, many of which are free in the first place.
The news article I was reading, which in fact gave me the idea to write this topic, was about a basketball player, I’ll run you though the story, so there is a basketball game going on, every ones watching, coaches are there, you’ve got the idea, then a 17 year old boy collapsed during the game, obviously the coach runs over.
Thankfully the night before, he was playing around on his iphone and he was touching up on his CPR skills, thankfully he had installed a amazing little application on his iphone, which he could run and it would take him though CPR steps, he was able to run the application from his iphone, while performing CPR to a member of the basketball team he coached. Saving his life, this isn’t the first time we’ve heard stories like this.
If you remember earlier this year, when the Haiti earthquake happened, a man who was trapped under bricks and what have you, sort of in a cave, was able to use his iphone to find out how to treat his leg injury and a head injury properly, which allowed him to stay alive for over 60 hours while he waited for people to search though the mess and find him.
There are more then 80 different applications in the app store for your iphone, which can teach you CPR, help you perform CPR, teach you first aid and act like a book for first aid, for example if you were with a friend who were to trip and break their ankle, using your iphone and a first aid application, you’d be able to easily find out exactly what to do. Your computer has a better memory than you, and it thinks faster than you, and doesn’t need any time off. That must mean it can do productivity better than you, making it the obvious place to go to find tools that will enhance your productivity. Or is it?
Maybe, just maybe, there’s a danger that you could get blinded by tech, and think that all the answers are to be found at the tip of your fingers through the keyboard. Maybe some of them are, and if you’re one of those tech-savvy people you’ve probably already identified the ones you need.
We hope you have, because the landscape is as variable as jelly at a children’s birthday party. New kids arrive on the tech block all the time, all of them offering faster, cleaner, interfaces with the web and the apps that can make your life faster and cleaner too, so what was appropriate last week or last month might may not be so last week or last month…
But just hang on for a moment. If you can do something faster with the aid of an app of a piece of cleverly written software, is that necessarily the way to get the job done? Is there a danger that you’ve succumbed to the insidious “I can, therefore I must” mantra which pervades much of modern business?
And here’s the difference between you and your computer. You have the power to think; the power to step away from the tech and re-evaluate how you fill your working life (and the bit of your non-working life that somehow seems to fill with work anyway. That’ll be the tech that’s taking over… ) In short, scrolling through the contents of a screen might get more done, but isn’t there a better way than, well, sitting in a chair and scrolling through the contents of a screen…?