iPhone dreams
Posted on February 7th, 2007
I know it doesn’t matter, but I have so many things I wish my next phone/PDA could do, I’m going to list them for my own amusement. Even though most of them won’t happen very soon, at least while the iPhone remains closed to native third-party applications.
I could manage data with specialized tools. Special-purpose editors for blogs like this, wikis for knowledge management at work, and genealogy records could take advantage of the multitouch UI.
Assuming it lacks aGPS, I could detect location by network to orient Google Maps and geocode photos.
[I happen to believe we’ll see aGPS or PSAP in a very early release, based on Jobs’s unusual and irrational enthusiasm about the satellite view in Google Maps.]
I could clean up and manipulate photos before sharing them online.
I could control my jukebox iMac from the couch without interrupting what’s currently playing to use Front Row. And control the rest of the home theater, lighting, etc.
I could update Last.fm on the fly.
I could play not just touchscreen microgames but serious games and puzzles.
Maybe I underestimate what will be possible with Safari alone, especially if it includes Flash. It’s already amazing how many of my “desktop” tools actually run in Safari or largely render via WebKit. If the iPhone is half as successful as it’s poised to be, it will quickly vault Safari to the ranks of browsers you cannot afford to ignore. I’d be surprised if Microsoft isn’t already talking to Apple about WPF/E.
Tags: apple, iphone, ui, uncategorized, usability, work
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Police 2.0
Posted on February 3rd, 2007
It has been fashionable in our culture to address undesirable behavior by enacting laws that call for the police to make the bad people that stop doing those bad things by arresting them. For the really, really bad things, like possessing a leaf from a plant which makes you happy if you consume it, we even mandate the judicial system exact revenge for us.
Of course, in the tubes of the interwebs this has gotten difficult to sustain. People say things we don’t approve of and publish content to audiences of millions without our consent, and all those pesky jurisdictions geographic prevent us from having our revenge on other people’s neighbors. If we’re going to create safe places for the children, we need a global security force that can be summoned in response to internet crimes.
I think a web service with an arrest(ip addr) function would do nicely. Those who have contributed enough to the politicians who support the force could install bookmarklets like arrest site owner that immediately dispatch officers.
Tags: crime, culture, funny, idea, politics, uncategorized, web
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Silver Hammer
Posted on August 17th, 2004
When the pope dies, the cardinal chamberlain (Camerlengo) of the holy Roman Church (currently Eduardo Cardinal Martinez Somalo) ascertains the pope’s death, traditionally by calling the pope three times by his baptismal name without response. The ritual of striking the head with a silver hammer (which would later be used to break the Fisherman’s Ring and the papal seal) may be replaced by covering the face with a cloth.
pauline.org
Thanks to Scott.
Tags: tagless, uncategorized
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Reibadailty would hadrly be aftcfeed
Posted on September 24th, 2003
I usually refrain from copying viral blogsphere memes, but it took me a while to hunt down anything meaningful about this
one so I’m noting it here. The supposedly self-evident truth is that word recognition is not based on shape or sequence as usually assumed, but rather mere letter content and the first and last letters. Several tools are available online to demonstrate this.
If you experiment with those tools, though, you’ll find that most of the jumbled results are far more difficult to read than the examples making the rounds. Clearly, these were generated by hand and optimized to maintain readability.
But what additional criteria is it that makes these examples almost as readable as plain text? It seems to me that the unit being mixed up is slightly larger than letters, but maybe not as large as phonemes. Consider the “gh” in “rghit”, “sh” and “ing” in “Elingsh”, and “th” is only sometimes broken up with a single vowel.
Maybe the vowel-consonant pattern is preserved? Maybe shape is mimicked for larger words (“Aoccdrnig”, “uinervtisy”)? Maybe letters are never moved too far? Even if it’s exaggerated for melodrama, at least this one has us thinking.
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Vintage Hans
Posted on July 25th, 2003
The Internet Archive has a record of my first webpage, circa May 13th,
1997.
As previously blogged, my earliest Internet footprint was a Usenet post on April 9th, 1993. Far more entertaining, though, is a thread pondering the impact of an Internet with a VR interface, where a response included “I’ve heard sme very good things about WorldWeb from friends who’ve demo it, but haven’t seen it myself.”
Tags: uncategorized
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