Whose Faulty Vision

Fallout 3

I’m severely looking forward to Fallout 3 on the PS3. I never played any of the previous games, but the game design of Oblivion, set in a post-apocalyptic future: what’s not to like? And the videos look incredible. (Not in terms of graphics, I mean, but in terms of the free-roaming gameplay.)

As a side note, and as long as I’m babbling about technology, I’m really impressed with Chrome, Google’s new browser. To get the link above, I typed “fallout 3″ into the Location bar of Chrome, and the link popped up as a suggestion, down where you’d normally expect your own browsing history. I didn’t even have to do a Google search or anything. This is kind of hard to describe, but try it and you’ll fall in love with it–it seems to know where you want to go before you do.

DRM Killing Your Music

This? This right here? This is why DRM sucks, and why I will never buy one of the DRMed eBooks that various companies have been pushing lately. If you buy a DRMed song, or book, or whatever, and the company that sold it to you decides to stop supporting it, *poof* you can’t listen to the song, or read the book, or whatever anymore. On the other hand, if I buy a paper book, it keeps working indefinitely.

My Dream Calendar

I’ve been using Apple’s fancy new “MobileMe” web applications since they upgraded. The interface is nice–I can add calendar items directly from my Web browser, that sync automatically to my iPhone and home computer.

But it could still be better. Here’s my vision for an ideal online calendar:

I log onto the online calendar, and it shows me my current schedule. I’ve just gotten an e-mail from my friend Jane Smith suggesting that we have lunch at 12:30 at Per Se on Wednesday. So I click an “add new calendar item”, and simply type “lunch with Jane at Per Se 12:30 Wednesday”. Then a whole lot of processing takes place behind the scenes.

First, the computer assumes that I mean 12:30 PM, rather than 12:30 AM, and that “Wednesday” means the upcoming Wednesday. It creates a new entry called “Lunch with Jane” with that date and time, and shows it to me so that I can change the details if it got any assumptions wrong.

Then it goes searching through my address book for people named Jane, asks me which Jane I mean, and attaches her phone number to the entry.

Then, since it knows that I live in NYC, it searches for places called “Per Se” in NYC and attaches the address, along with a map link, to the calendar entry. Once again, if there’s more than one, it asks me which one I mean, starting with the one closest to my work address (for weekday daytime entries) or my home address (for other entries). Of course, I would be able to change those settings if I worked unusual hours, or if I were out of town for a week, or whatever.

And presto, instead of a bunch of buttons and menus, I simply type one sentence and I get all of the information that I need, stuck in the calendar automatically and synced to my home computer and my iPhone.

All of the technology is there today to do what I’ve just described. Indeed, I believe that Google Calendar does some of it, although I haven’t tried it out myself. It wouldn’t be very hard to program–I could probably put it together myself if I had access to Apple’s servers, although it would take a few rounds of user testing to work out all of the possible types of sentences people were likely to want to enter.

So how ’bout it, Apple? Want to make calendar entries much easier to enter?

Test post from iPhone

I finally got an iPhone, replacing my poor dying Treo. And lo and behold, they just released a WordPress app for it. So this is just a test of the new app. I expect there’ll be more posts about the phone itself as I play with it.

Update: Cool, it worked perfectly. Posting from the go has never been easier.

No New iPhone Yet

I went by the Apple Store on 5th Avenue today, figuring that all of the crazy “I’ll wait in line for hours for the latest hot toy” people would have gotten theirs yesterday.

I was wrong. The line was an estimated 3 and a half hours long, according to the Apple employee watching the line.

So I don’t have a new iPhone yet. Maybe in a few days, or longer if they run out of stock.

iPhone Apps Store

I obviously don’t have my shiny new iPhone 3G yet, and probably won’t for a few weeks. But meanwhile, the iPhone Apps Store is open, and I’ve been browsing around, and I’m seriously impressed. The apps I knew I’d be able to get (crossword program, ebook reader) are there. But there’s also:

• Pandora. For free. I love Pandora to death, but the one problem with it is that it isn’t portable–you have to play it on a computer, unless you’re willing to buy one of a few particular phones and pay a monthly service charge. Not anymore.
• A “to do” list program that knows where you are and shows to-dos tied to your particular location, which was one of the GPS-enabled apps I was speculating about earlier.
• A program that knows where you are, and shows nearby places that your friends have recommended. (Of course, you need your friends to have the same app, but it’s still a cool concept.

And hundreds more. It’s a great launch list, and many of the apps are free. Good start, Apple.

Stupid Microsoft Interface of the Whenever

Microsoft Outlook, when I have unread mail, puts a little envelope icon in the bottom right corner of the screen, next to the clock. That’s not the stupid interface–that’s kind of handy. The stupid interface is that the icon counts unread mail even if my filters send it strait to my “Junk Mail” folder, or even if it’s in my “Deleted Items” folder. Why do I care if I have unread spam? I want a setting that only shows unread mail in my inbox.

Apple’s Mail.app, incidentally, gets this right. The unread mail count on the Mail icon only counts mail in your inboxes, not in your spam folder.