Apps For The Ages

Dining:Hot Dog App. Talk about the perfect app for the digital age. If you take it out of its bun and hold it straight up, it looks just like a 1. Let's be very clear, we are speaking here about a very specific hot dog app purchased at a street site from a cart, truck or actual "weenie-mobile." We are not talking about those packaged things in the grocery or those rip-off pretenders at the ballgame, or from cute local pagoda-like emporiums and such. This app may be downloaded in many areas in and around New York City or any major city. In fact, if your city doesn't have a downloadable hot dog site, it is not major. I downloaded one recently on Fifth Avenue near 79th Street. Delicious. A high proportion of NYC site administrators are Egyptian, but Arabic is not required to download. Also, many sites offer ad-ons like mustard, sauerkraut or chili. Basic Cost: $1.50-2.00 per download.

Gardening/Home:Lawn Mower App. This ingenious application is a throwback like those special photo apps that allow your phone or camera to take photos that look like ones from an old Kodak Brownie or Polaroid Land. Many of you will not even know that the best lawn mowers ever engineered did not require a purchase of petroleum products (except for very minor  "4 in 1" lube of blades and wheels) and actually made a very pleasant sound as users pushed them across their own lawns. Not only that, but the patented blade hardware sliced the grass in a way that allowed it to release the lawn's secret fragrances into the air. Ah, Chanel Number Fifty! Cost: Free, if grandpa has one in the garage (may need lube), $8-25 at various tag sale sites, $99.99 new at SunJoe.com

Travel:Staten Island Ferry App: This is, without a doubt, the best travel value app for the New York metropolitan area, even better than the subway app and much cleaner. Many tourists, especially Europeans, when they could afford to visit back in the day before they imported American financial Not-Know-How and went broke, used to waste time and money on fancy-schmancy yachts, circling and circling. This wonderful application is super-efficient. In one roundtrip, you've got your close-up view of the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, Brooklyn, Lower (and original) Manhattan from the harbor, the Hudson and East Rivers, plus the harbor itself...the whole shebang in an hour or less! And, we haven't even mentioned views of New Jersey and Staten Island, but why would we? Excited? Well, here is the best thing about this app. Cost: Free (not kidding, since 1997) from download site at Whitehall Street in Manhattan or St. George SI if, for some really strange reason, you must begin on Staten Island.

Travel: Mid-Town NYC Public Rest Room App: Venture Cap firms kept this one a big secret for years, since so many of them had trouble finding a place to do their business while in town on business. This app is, honestly, still not widely available, which makes the sites still so valuable. Also, since everything, and we mean everything in NYC gets politicized, even you know what, you will not see public facilities on the streets like in Paris, since the city has never been able to find a street-potty app friendly enough for heavy wheelchair use. Here is a sample: Site 1. Grand Central Terminal, Lower Level; be smart about this and use the one near the south east corner of the lower level; it is cleaner than the one on the west side, and the hand driers actually dry your hands. All European tourists, back in the day (see above), used this particular app site. Cost: free. Other secret private app sites available on special request, since this is a family-owned blog and can't sustain lawsuits resulting from well-intended but overzealous reporting.