When It's All Geek to You, Look It Up in the Jargon File

There I was staring at some angry fruit salad, when my boss who thinks he's an alpha geek, tells me he's gonna blammo me if I don't get busy. I just pulled an all-nighter groking a bletcherous communications protocol and the bag biter is treating me like a tape monkey. Just what you'd expect from a narg, I tell myself.

If it all sounds like geek to you, it probably is. That's when you might need the Jargon File app from Jofti Ltd. to help you make sense of it all. The Jargon File app is a duplicate of the Jargon File Web site, a public-domain compendium of computer and hacker slang from as far back as the '60s (the last revision to the file was in December 2003).

According to Jofti, the Jargon File app is not intended to be a dictionary but a "mix of the historical and humerous" (their misspelling) terms.

There's not much to the Jargon File app. It consists of a glossary of hacker slang and computer terms, definitions and several chapters on hacker folklore, hacker writing style and related topics. You can browse the list of terms and navigate forward and backward through the terms and chapters.

There's a significant usability problem with Jargon File. When you select an item from the glossary, then go to the definition, you can't return to the glossary. After that, you can only navigate to the next term or back to the previous term or to the beginning or end of the glossary. In other words, the only way to return to the glossary is to quit Jargon File and start anew.

Although the Jargon File app is entertaining for a while, I'd save my $0.99 if I were you.