Marc Cellucci
The early days of iOS were the basically the Wild West, where you could put out almost any kind of app you wanted, and if it was a good idea, it had the chance to sell. I went over this in the third part of my series on app development, but there were a lot of silly, creative apps coming out, and it was fun to watch the charts and see what kind of new stuff was coming out each week. (Like all good things, it came to an end pretty quickly though.)
When the iPad was announced, I didn’t think much of it. Oooh, a really big iPhone, whoop-de-doo. It came out in America before it did in Japan, and I happened to go to San Antonio that summer, and my dad got me an iPad. I was blown away. You could actually touch web pages! It was straight out of sci-fi, and I was totally on board.
And that screen! I remember thinking that the screen was so big that you could get a tan off of it… and then the idea of a joke app was born.
Portable Tanning Machine is a straight up silly, stupid app. I put it out for the bargain price of nothing (even though it cost me to have the art and programming done), with my only goal being to maybe get a laugh from people, and to hopefully have people smash that “More Apps” button and see the other stuff my company was doing.
The concept is simple. When you press Start, flat images made to look like tanning bed lamps flicker on, and that’s it. Then you put the screen close to your body or face, and hopefully get a laugh out of somebody and become the life of the party.
Please note: you can’t actually get a tan from this app. I don’t think so, anyway.
It’s still up in the App Store, and I’m surprised Apple hasn’t taken it down yet, but I’m sure that day will come soon, and I don’t have any plans to update it. So get it while it’s hot!
