A guide to apps for people who hate apps

Although I am as much a slave to technology as the next guy, I don’t embrace it willingly. I never play video games. I don’t listen to music while riding my bike. I refuse to jam a white stick in my ear so I can talk to distant people as I walk.

It would be a stretch to call me a luddite, but it’s fair to say I’m luddite-adjacent.

Yes, I carry my cell phone wherever I go, but I tell myself it’s purely for safety reasons. If I crash my bike and break a leg on that country road, non-tech cries for help to a corn field will fall on deaf ears.

Beyond that grudging acceptance, however, it seems to me that technology mostly serves to separate us from the physical world.

So imagine my surprise to find that, over the past few months or so, I have become addicted to three apps that make me wonder how I ever enjoyed life before they found me. I think of them as apps for people who hate apps.

The first one I discovered by accident on a cell phone that I bought last summer — a Verizon Edge, pretty cheap and basic as cell phones go. Whenever I snap a photo, four tabs at the bottom offer options of what to do with it. Three of them are obvious—Share, Edit, or Delete.

But the fourth was a puzzle to me. It said Lens, with a strange icon like a box with a dot in the middle.

“Huh,” I said to myself. “I wonder what that button does?” I tend to learn things not by reading the manual, but by pushing the button like a monkey curious to see what happens next. I would make a lousy astronaut.

But I wasn’t in space at the time, so I figured what could possibly go wrong?

The picture was of a toad I’d met on a September bike ride, and when I pushed the Lens button, a box in the photo zeroed in on the critter. Beneath it, a line identified it as an American Toad (bufo americanus. Good to know it wasn’t an immigrant.)

If you were curious, you could read further and learn how to examine its warts and spots to confirm that it isn’t a Fowler’s Toad. Whatever that is.

Since then, I’ve been snapping and identifying everything that moves. That spectacular red spider on the asphalt path was Araneus trifolium, or shamrock spider, and those butter-colored mushrooms under the early October pines were butter mushrooms. I ate them with my pot roast that evening. (The ‘shrooms, not the spider.) That beautiful yellow butterfly with black stripes was an Eastern Tiger Swallowtail—a male, because it lacked blue dots along its tail. It likes to feed on Butterfly Milkweed. Whatever that is.

Another app I recently discovered is called Picture This. Snap a shot of pretty much any plant, and it will tell you what you’re looking at. Recently I’ve spent a lot of time learning about all the flowers I inherited in my wife’s garden after she passed away. She told me the names of all of them but…well, you know how it is with husbands sometimes. Or even most times.

I know some of the flowers’ names, but that little one with the handsome lance-shaped leaves and cheery spray of bright orange blossoms that turned into October cotton-fluff seedpods? I don’t think she planted it. I think it just showed up, like a beautiful weed.

Picture This tells me that it’s a Butterfly Milkweed, and — get this — it’s a favorite food for Tiger Swallowtails! Suddenly my world was connecting up and making sense, thanks to technology!

I also learned that Native Americans and pioneers boiled its roots to cure diarrhea and used its stems as candle wicks—good to know for when the zombie apocalypse cuts off our toilet-and-power grid.

One morning on my country-road bike ride I learned that those periwinkle-blue flowers growing so abundantly in the ditch are called chicory, and that early Americans made a kind of coffee out of its roots. Go figure—all this dreaded technology was connecting me not only to my garden, but also to our American history.

A third app, maybe my favorite of all, is called Merlin Bird ID. Stand outside, push the button, and the screen will tell you the name of every birdsong within earshot.

It’s astounding how sensitive it is, able to pick up the chatter of redwing blackbirds hundreds of yards away in the meadow. It doesn’t even matter if you’re talking or if nearby traffic growls past, because it will sort out the birdsong regardless—and still separate the subtle difference between a house finch and a common yellowthroat.

That bright little two-tone song echoing from deep among the oaks, so high up that I can never see the singer? That’s the Eastern Wood-Pewee, of course. It sounds exactly like it’s saying “Pe-wee,” so I should have guessed its name, but it took technology to tell me for sure. So too with the gray catbird, that sounds like…well, you know.

A lot of the birds, bugs and plants have hit the road for this year, but if you’re planning a trip to warmer climes and want to acquaint yourself with the oddities you might encounter, give these three apps a chance. They may just tug you back from luddite-land, and send you out on a mission to learn more about your world.

And once the grid goes down, I’ll see you at the zombie apocalypse! I’ll be the regular guy with the homemade coffee and candles, conversing with the birds.

TR Kerth is the author of the book “Revenge of the Sardines.” Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com.

---