British Prime Minister David Cameron will soon get a personalised iPad application, specifically designed for him, which will collate all government statistics from across the Whitehall bureaucracy and also provide him with a live news feed.
The iPad application, according to the London Times, is being created by a team of programmers in the Cabinet Office and it is expected to be ready by March.
The idea for the special iPad application came from a trip by Mr Cameron’s advisers, who were not identified, to the United States. It was also not revealed whether the advisers were inspired by any such similar app used by senior American officials.
The special software application will allow the British Prime Minister to see at a glance a wide variety of data such as the latest NHS waiting-list figures, crime statistics and unemployment figures. The app will also include “real-time” information from Google, Twitter and other news sources.
The application is likely to be made available more widely, the report quoted an unknown source as saying, and eventually could also be made available for public distribution. However, the plan for public distribution means that Mr Cameron’s app is unlikely to feature any secret data, especially the contents of ministerial red boxes. Mr Cameron, well known for his love of the iPad, reads newspapers, tunes in to radio programmes and watches episodes of his favourite television programmes on the Apple device.
It was revealed last year that Mr Cameron and his chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne are both fans of the Angry Birds game, which involves using a catapult to fire tweeting birds at wood, glass and stone edifices.
Mr Cameron does not use email like his predecessor Gordon Brown, who had a secure email address linked with the government network. Mr Camer-on prefers to receive papers on which he can write notes which can then be reviewed by his staff. However, he does stay in informal contact with MPs and advisers via text messages.