‘Fanboy’ Cameron gets his own iPad app
By Ian Dunt Follow @IanDunt
David Cameron is set to have his own personalised iPad app designed for him, collating government statistics and a live news feed.
Programmers in Whitehall will bring together NHS waiting-list figures, unemployment numbers and crime stats, along with several other indicators.
The prime minister will be able to scan the numbers at a glance, while a real-time news aggregator, including Google and Twitter, will scroll to the side.
The app is expected to be ready by March.
It is a fitting development for Britain's most tech-savvy prime minister, who has long boasted of his Apple set-up at home.
No 10's previous occupant, Gordon Brown, had a secured email address on the government network, but even that was a major step forward from Tony Blair, whose did not use emails at all while prime minister.
Mr Cameron mentions Apple products in several interviews, leading some online commentators to brand him a 'fanboy'.
"I'm very proud of the fact that I've got an iMac and I've got a speaker remotely linked without a wire, which I did myself," he told the Telegraph last year.
"I have all the music on the iMac. The cool thing is that I now control my iMac from the iPad, to play out through the speaker."
Mr Cameron has a pick-and-choose relationship with technology, however. He has steered clear of Twitter after memorably observing in 2009 that "too many tweets might make a tw*t" – a statement for which he later apologised.
