A One Man App Store...

[Originally written Nov 14, 2009]

Today's tale is a spotlight on one of the unsung heroes of the Windows Mobile platform. Plant your tongue firmly in your cheek and learn of a man who predicted the future, even if he himself didn't know he did it.

Occasionally I play with my wife's iPhone and peruse the offerings at the iTunes App Store. As you might expect, any of collection of 90,000 of anything will have a quite a few clunkers, and the App Store certainly doesn't disappoint! While there are certainly some very good apps and games, the vast majority are tiny apps with a single feature that usually is already available in the core functions of the phone- an app that finds the nearest coffee shop, ATM or nail salon by pre-loading a Google Maps search with the appropriate keywords and displaying the results, for example, or an app that launches a single TV or radio station stream in the phone's media player.

With that on my mind, a couple of days ago while reading Microsoft's Windows Mobile support forum on Usenet to lend a helping hand, I came across an auto-generated posting I've seen many times before: an invitation from Vincent Collura, a Canadian self-described "inventor/engineer" to visit his site www.cebeans.com and check out the over 6,750 free programs for Pocket PCs and touchscreen Windows phones available there. While offering that number of programs is a mildly impressive feat for any Windows Mobile freeware site, what makes this one unique, is that the nearly 7000 programs are all written by Vincent himself! This guy has averaged writing two programs a day every day the platform has been in existence!

To be fair, these aren't complicated multi-functional apps- even Vince himself doesn't suggest that. He calls them "beans," presumably a reference to their small size, sheer number, and relative insignificance. They're simplistic apps like you'd expect from a Visual Basic 101 programming class: many are very similar (a DVD collection database app and music CD database app are separate apps for example,) many simply launch a single function that could be just as easily handled by an existing included program, shortcut or favorite (the "TVNASA" app that simply opens Windows Media Player and displays the NASA TV video stream) and many are absolutely, mind-bogglingly ridiculous (like the "BirdTeacher" app that randomly replays any of five .wav files you pre-record to train your parrot to talk, or the very similar "BabyProgrammer" bean that "allows you to record a word or phrase then place the headphones on the child and the sound file will repeat and train the baby to learn the word..." Um, "place headphones" on a baby? Has this guy ever HAD a baby?)

I've given Vince a little "constructive criticism" on the support group before about the usefulness of his beans (and his weekly auto-generated self-promoting posts have generated a bit of ire there over the years,) but in retrospect, I realize I had it all wrong! Vince wasn't just an amateur programmer/hobbyist pumping out a pile of a mostly useless, redundant programs, he was a man ahead of his time- a true visionary! He alone predicted a day when people would sift through pages and pages of ridiculous, redundant, tiny apps that no one actually needs. He was just a decade early, and therefore coding for the wrong platform! One can easily imagine "BirdTeacher," "BabyProgrammer," or "TVNASA" as iPhone apps- they'd probably even make it into one of those commercials; ("Say your parrot hasn't learned to talk... There's An App For That...")

"LoveSlave," however, probably wouldn't make it into the TV ads: ("This program can be used when making love. Place the headphones on your lover and use the joypad up/down to select a command and right/left to send it to your lover..." (Sorry you TouchPro2 users- you need a D-pad for this app!) If Vince has tried using this app himself, it might help explain his unfamiliarity with babies... (Yes, "LoveSlave" is an actual bean- I can't make this stuff up! In fact, there are 130 beans in the "Love" category alone, including a few that perform functions I can't talk about without violating this site's posting guidelines! Vince offers free email support for all of his apps. You might ask if he needs beta testers...)

So, let's tip our hat to Vince Collura, the One-Man App Store, who proved long before the existence of the iPhone, that there was a mostly useless or awkwardly implemented "App for That!" Or, as Vince himself says, "Did you get your beans today?"