simplicity

Making some much needed changes to the blog over the coming weeks. I’ve implemented a ‘Lifestream‘, which I will be messing around with. Also, I will be implementing a digest of my shared items from Google Reader. I’ll be configuring that and some other things over the next few days to make sure everything is on the up and up.

I bought a Macbook Pro back in 2006. There is this little feature, which I assume all Macbooks have but which is rarely promoted, that does something so minor but makes so much sense that I can’t understand why no hardware company (I’m looking at you HP) hasn’t yet adopted it. It’s minuscule, but brilliant. What is it you ask? It keeps a memory of your headphones and internal speaker volume independently and it adjusts the volume based on whether the headphones are in or not. So for example, I usually have my headphones at a reasonable volume but keep my internal speakers muted. If I’m out I can plug in my headphones and not worry about turning mute off my speakers. At the same time, I can take my headphones out at any time and not worry about some large audible noise randomly escaping from my Macbook in public.

This would make sense for a lot of PC makers to implement within their hardware. It’d be really helpful at work when you remove your headphones take your laptop to a meeting but forget to turn the speaker volume on mute.

Ouch

Insane Parking Garage Backflip – Watch more Funny Videos

Ordered the new iPhone last week from AT&T. Attempted to purchase the phone the day of the release but it turns out if you’re not the owner of the contract Apple won’t sell you the phone. Surprisingly though AT&T delivered quite quickly. Placed an order on Tuesday and by Thursday I had the device.

So far the phone has been great for me. Much faster and more responsive then my old edge version. Haven’t put it through it’s paces yet, but haven’t seen anything that I’m disappointed in yet, well except background processing doesn’t exist but that’s another story…

iPhone Label Category

I’ve been playing around with the new iPhone 3.0 firmware and recently noticed something interesting. There has been an addition of an ‘iPhone’ label added to the type of phone number associated to a contact. For example when you add a phone number you can associate it to a ‘mobile’, ‘home’, ‘fax’, ‘other’, etc. label. If you view the screenshot you will notice that a ‘iPhone’ label has been added. While it would seem that this is just something visual it really doesn’t make sense from a user perspective. Why would you want to specify a phone number with an ‘iPhone’ label unless it would give the user the idea that they could use some specific functionality with it. While I am only speculating here, but this could eventually be a way to determine if a contact can use video conference (obviously with new hardware) or you can do iPhone-to-iPhone messaging or in general some sort of phone-to-phone communication.

Last week, Google announced an upgrade to its Web-based Gmail service for users of the iPhone and Android-powered devices. The new service has an easier-to-use interface, loads and searches e-mails faster, and has the ability to check e-mails even without access to a wireless signal.

via Technology Review: Gmail Sidesteps the App Store.

I am not against web applications for the iPhone. I think it’s perfectly legitimate if the application is done right. The new version of the Gmail web app for the iPhone is a great example of an application done right. The application is fast, unless you’re on the Edge network like yours truly, and in general the usability and functionality of the application is perfect. What I believe the application lacks is the ability to notify end-users when they have new mail. As a result, the end-user has to either keep checking the Gmail web app for new emails or if they have the iPhone mail application setup to fetch Gmail on a certain interval then they can use the iPhone mail notification to load up the web app. Both ways are pretty counterintuitive and kludgy at best. What I hope Google does is take advantage of the new notification system in the 3.0 firmware to notify end-users when they have new email. I assume they could leverage the notification service by creating a dummy application which holds their Gmail web application and then attaching the Apple notification service. I think that would be quite deece.

Most of these are pretty old, but there are a few new ones that I haven’t seen before like the Maroney one. It’s fun to watch. I recommend turning on the HD version of the video.

Saw this today and thought it was hilarious. It was great how they included all the scenes from the various shows.

Found this video today thought it was pretty good. It happened last night at the Wake/UMD game.

SmartSwitch embeds intelligence into a traditionally simplistic device – the ordinary household light switch. With SmartSwitch, the mindless activity of flipping a switch becomes an informed decision. Equipped with a network connection and a brake pad, the switch provides its user with tactile feedback about the amount of energy being used either within their household or by the electrical grid as a whole.

via Core77 Presents: Greener Gadgets Design Competition.

Interesting idea. From reading the comments though there seems to be a significant amount of negative criticism. I personally think it’s a great idea, flipping the switch has become such a natural reaction that not a lot of thought goes into what you are doing. This could provide a little bit of the spark to remind you that you may want to rethink what you are doing from a power consumption stand point. I’ve added the video of the SmartSwitch demo, though something like this needs to be physically inspected to get the true idea behind it.