This App Weighs Produce on Your iPhone

While some apps can connect a kitchen scale to your device, the Plum-O-Meter from FlexMonkey makes a scale out of the phone itself. Owners of the iPhone 6s can use the app by placing small fruits or vegetables on the device’s touch screen. The heaviest item on the screen is highlighted by a yellow circle and the “weight” of the item is displayed as the percentage of the screen’s maximum allowable force. 

The concept and the name for the app were inspired by the developer’s experience eating plums for breakfast on Sunday mornings:

Here at FlexMonkey Towers, the ever beautiful Mrs FlexMonkey and I love to spend our Sunday mornings luxuriating in bed drinking Mimosas, listening to The Archers omnibus and eating some lovely plums. Being a generous sort of chap, whenever I pull a pair of plums from the freshly delivered Fortnum & Mason’s hamper, I always try to ensure she has the larger of the two. However, this isn’t always easy, especially after the third of fourth breakfast cocktail. 3D Touch to the rescue! My latest app, the Plum-O-Meter, has been specifically designed to solve this problem. Simply place two delicious plums on the iPhone’s screen and the heavier of the two is highlighted in yellow so you can hand it to your beloved without fear of being thought of as a greedy-guts.

Because the app doesn’t give exact weight measurements, it isn’t very useful to people who don't also face this oddly specific plum problem. Luckily, the code is open source, so programmers are free to tweak and improve upon it with something more practical. For example, user experience and user interface researcher Stoo Sepp was able to adjust the app so that it also calculates an item's weight in grams. The touch-screen scale technology varies in accuracy based on where the object is placed on the screen, and it only seems to work with soft-skinned fruits and vegetables.

Even if the app does become 100 percent accurate, you may want to think twice before weighing your fruit on something dirtier than toilet seat.