Sending text messages while drunk is usually a bad idea, but how do you keep yourself from committing such an embarrassing faux pas while intoxicated? Simple: Use an app to check whether you're sober enough to be using your cellphone.
An iPhone app called Textalyzer will do the trick.
The app itself is pretty basic. It'll set you back a buck — which is really a bargain considering how much humiliation it might spare you — and then serve as a barrier between reality and your mojito-hazed little world.
Textalyzer lets you create a list of people whom you shouldn't be texting when you don't have all your wits about you — this probably includes exes, family members, and co-workers — and then forces you to go through a series of virtual sobriety checks before allowing you to contact them.
These sobriety checks are a series of four little games — 3 Coconut Monte, Tap Quika, Lucky Numbers, and Top Me Off — and they're actually pretty fun. They're also amusingly challenging even for a sober tech blogger who has nothing except an energy drink or three running through her body.
I could imagine that these little games would be deterrents enough to prevent any tragic drunk texting, but there are a few flaws with the nature of the app:
- Only text messages sent from within the app are subject to a sobriety checks. Messages sent through the iPhone's default SMS app will go through normally.
- The app doesn't prevent you from using any other messaging service, such as Facebook messages, Twitter DMs, or similar.
- You could easily call people instead of texting them — and thereby also skip any sobriety checks.
Basically, unless you're able to somehow ensure that you will only use this app while drunk, it won't help you much. If it could somehow be implemented to lock up all apps on your iPhone on the other hand — which it can't do due to limitations Apple places on iOS developers — then we'd be in business.
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Rosa Golijan writes about tech here and there. She's a bit obsessed with Twitter and loves to be liked on Facebook.