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Apps（應用程序） on tap （可隨時使用）
The beauty of bite-sized（一口大小）為比喻意） software
顧微老師批注
ASKED WHAT MAKES mobile apps so special, Bart Decrem, a co-founder of Tapulous（美國著名游戲公司，iphone應用程序開發商）, gives a reply that could have come straight out of the mouth of Steve Jobs. “Apps are nuggets（珍寶） of magic,” he says. “They very elegantly address the strengths and weaknesses of the mobile internet.” Mr Decrem knows the app economy well. After building a number of successful gaming apps at Tapulous, including “Tap Tap Revenge”, which involves tapping on coloured balls as they move down a phone’s screen, he sold his company last year to Disney, where he is now an executive.
Hordes of other developers have piled into the app business, creating hundreds of thousands of offerings for online stores run by Apple and Google, by telecoms firms such as South Korea’s SK Telecom, and by independent app stores such as GetJar.（大批開發商躋身應用程序產業，通過例如韓國sk這樣的電信公司，以及像GetJar這樣的獨立應用程序商店，為蘋果和谷歌的在線商店提供了成千上完的應用程序） The appetite for apps appears insatiable（貪得無厭的）: Gartner, a research firm, estimates that almost 18 billion have been downloaded since the first app store was opened by Apple in 2008. By 2013, it thinks, the number will have risen to 49 billion. Many are games such as “Tap Tap Revenge” and “Angry Birds”, in which a bunch of enraged digital fowl wage war against evil pigs that have pinched their eggs. But there are also plenty with a more serious purpose, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Child ID iPhone app, which lets parents store information about their kids and send it to the authorities if a child goes missing.（也會有大量用于嚴肅用途的應用程序，例如美國聯邦調查局的iphone應用程序child ID, 可以讓家長存儲自己孩子的星系，如果孩子失蹤，就可以將這些星系發給當局。）
In many ways, apps are representative of the changes taking place in personal technology. Small, downloadable chunks of software, they give people access to information in a neatly packaged format and most have one or more of the following attributes: simplicity, cheapness and instant gratification（即時享受）.
They have caught on（流行） partly because many websites do not look good when viewed on phones’ tiny screens. Apps do a much better job of making the best of（盡可能善用） the space available. Using them is intuitive（直覺的）, by and large（大體上）. Many are free; many others cost no more than a fancy cup of coffee. Some of the most creative apps make the most of phones’ sensors. Gaming ones use accelerometers and gyroscopes to track users’ motions, while mobile-navigation apps rely on inbuilt GPS systems.
Another reason why apps have proved popular is that, unlike websites, they do not need a constant connection to the internet. Instead, they are stored in mobile gadgets’ silicon memories and refreshed when a new connection is available. This also explains why they launch so much faster than software on PCs. “Apps mean that people are no longer going to be satisfied waiting for spinning hard disks on PCs to deliver what they want,” says Tim Bajarin of Creative Strategies, a consultancy.
There has been speculation that apps may fade when new websites designed to work better on mobile devices appear. But that is unlikely to happen while mobile-internet connectivity remains patchy（不完整的）. Fans also point out that apps are easy to create.
Most, however, are destined for obscurity. Today there are more than 425,000 apps in Apple’s online store and more than 250,000 in Google’s Android Market. Yet in a recent survey of Android-phone users in America, Nielsen, another research firm, discovered that the ten most popular apps accounted for 43% of usage and the top 50 for a whopping 61%. Admittedly, these statistics may be influenced by the pre-loading of apps for services such as Facebook and Google Maps onto many phones. But the results are still telling（有重大影響的）. Part of the problem is that there is still no reliable search engine for discovering outstanding apps. No doubt there will soon be an app for that too.
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