Published on April 18, 2008
Edward Tufte has posted a video critique of the iPhone’s interface. Please take a moment to watch it before reading my reactions, I don’t want to bias your own reaction.
[Full Disclosure: I own an iPhone, and I really enjoy it. I am generally a proponent of Apple's approach to product design, but I do not consider myself a "fanboy". I'll be the first to criticize something I don't like, and I really try to approach everything without a bias.]
Tufte makes some really great points. I was constantly nodding my head as he spoke about the content becoming the interface. Just last week I was commenting to another designer on how the interface in software should get out of the way when it’s not needed. Tufte’s definition of “computer administrative debris” is spot on, and I’m great full to have a term for something I’ve been having trouble defining in words.
Continue reading ‘Edward Tufte on the iPhone Interface’
Published on January 24, 2008
Ars Technica is reporting on (what I think is) a pretty exciting event for OS X software development. Apple has provided software developers with access to the Calendar Store, the system that manages the database of events, todos, and alarms in OS X. This type of access has been possible for the Address Book since 10.2. For instance, you can associate a screen name in Adium with an Address Book entry, and information is populated automatically. Now that same type of interaction can happen between third-party applications and the Calendar database.
I am going to guess that this is going to have an immediately HUGE effect on GTD type applications. The Mac has already seen this market of software grow very quickly. Now these systems will be able to tie into the same database, a database that is also integrated into first-party Apple apps like iCal and Mail.
The area I’m very excited about is calendar synchronization. There are a few tools out already that synchronize online calendars with iCal. Spanning Sync and Plaxo will both sync Google Calendar to iCal, however these require periodic updates and dealing with duplicates can get messy and scary if you make the wrong move in resolving a conflict. Now, I hope we will see instant two-way synchronization that works completely behind the scenes. The Calendar Store access allows applications listen for changes in the Calendar database, and act on them immediately, so I believe that duplicates and other issues related to periodic syncing can be minimized, or in an app to app situation, completely eliminated.
One of the primary reasons I switched my day-to-day computer from Windows to Mac was for the cleanly integrated PIM applications, and I’m ecstatic to see continued and increasing support to make things work together even better.
Via: Ars Technica
Published on January 8, 2008
Erica (you may see her posts over at The Unofficial Apple Weblog) is at it again… she has hacked together Listen, a native app that records a snippet of audio from the iPhone’s built-in speaker, and then goes online to identify the song. It’s in early development, but so far it has given me perfect results, and I’m subjecting it to more than Top 40. I’d LOVE to see Sam Steele integrate this into his MobileScrobbler app, so that you could grab a sample of a song around you and be at the song’s Last.fm page in seconds. Here’s a quick video I did to show the application in action.
[youtube BHK3OGrQ1Kc]
There are quite a few other phones that have been able to do this for a while, I’m sure you’ve seen the Verizon commercials. However, I’m completely impressed by the community of developers hacking away at the iPhone and iPod Touch. They have been the only reason that the extremely bland (when stock) iPhone has become such an interesting device. I hope the official Apple Mobile OSX SDK gives developers easy access to the hardware. I know they’ve stated that it will be limited, but I’m hoping the limits aren’t too tight to allow this type of development.
[Update]: A couple Digg users have taken a look inside the application and found that it’s piggy-backing on Sony’s sound identification service for its own cell phones. It will be interesting to see how long the app can stay alive.
godling72 says, “Did a quick look at the app. The magic is done by impersonating a Sony EricssonK810i phone (”SonyEricssonK810i/R6BC Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 UNTRUSTED/1.0″), and using sony’s service: http://wap.sonyericsson.com/recognize/query (which uses Gracenote MusicID technology) .”
Via: The Unofficial Apple Weblog
Published on December 6, 2007
Google released a new beta of their Google Maps for Mobiles application that uses cell phone towers to triangulate the user’s position without needing GPS. The beta is limited to a few cell phone systems right now. I tried it on my Windows Mobile 5 phone and it works great. Naturally, iPhone owners instantly speculated about when Apple and Google would offer this functionality as an update to the iPhone’s Google Maps application.
It seems that www.sanoodi.com has beat Google and Apple to the punch, releasing a “My Location” app for the iPhone that seems to enable Cell Tower based positioning in Google Maps.
You have to be running native applications to get the functionality. Add www.sanoodi.com/iphone to your installer.app sources, and find the app under the Misc category.
I’ve only used both the official Google solution and this new solution from one location. They both seem to be just about equally accurate. I’m impressed that the “hacked” solution can be just as accurate as the official solution so soon.
Thanks to Wayne Sutton for the heads up.
Update: You can read more information at the Hackint0sh forums. This app isn’t using triangulation yet, which explains why it’s a good distance off most of the time. It passes the CellID of the tower you’re connect to and compared that to a database of towers. Then the position of that tower is fed into Google Maps.
Published on December 5, 2007
iMatrix is an iPhone/Touch native application + web application that adds QR Code reading/logging to the iPhone. QR Codes can dump data into Safari, Contacts, Google Maps, Calendar, Notes, or even initiate e-mails and phone calls. I know Asian phones have had this for quite a while, it would be great to see it grow in the US.Check out the official website for much more information.
read more | digg story
