iPhone Geek Tax

Bill Maher called those additional $200 that we paid for getting the iPhone before the price drop the geek tax. This is so appropriate; I love it! Watch the video of Bill's diatribe (38 seconds).

And if you want to hear more of Bill, subscribe to the podcast of his HBO show Real Time with Bill Maher, which is so far free to download over at HBO.

Jott, Hold that Thought for Me

I started using Jott a while ago and then stopped using it as I was listening more and more Podcast in my car. Then Erik started using the service, which reminded me how great Jott was. Let me tell you quickly how it works:

• You create an account for yourself for free on jott.com. As part of the registration process, you need to tell them about your phone number.
• Then, you just call their free 866 number from your phone and leave a message. (Jott knows who are thanks to caller id.) Soon after, you will receive an email with the text of the your message.

Yes, Jott does voice recognition for you. If you wish, you can also listen to the audio of your message. What is amazing is that their voice recognition works stunningly well, without training. It works much better than any software I had tried in the past. What amazing voice recognition technology is Jott using? Humans! According to their FAQ:

We use a combination of machine and human transcription to convert your voice to text.

Of course, this raises concerns about privacy. There is a good chance that a human listens to every message you leave. This is one more reason for not leaving confidential information in your messages. Again, from the Jott FAQ:

Our transcribers have no way of associating your personally identifiable information with the recorded jotts they are transcribing (unless, of course, you make that information part of the recording). They operate in a “clean” environment that is also used for transcribing sensitive medical dictations, with no tools or other equipment that would allow them to record or make use of this information.

Tactile Feedback coming to the iPhone?

Nokia started talking about tactile feedback a while ago, and they now have running demos:

Don’t be fooled by simple vibrational imitations folks, this is the real McCoy – you press a key on the screen, and it clicks under your finger with exactly the same sort of fingertip feedback as if you’d pressed a conventional keyboard key.

People have a lot of features in mind for the iPhone v2, but tactile feedback doesn't seem to be on the top of most people's list. But I bet it is for Apple.

Tactile feedback would be a great improvement to the soft keyboard. When I first started using the iPhone, one of the first thing I did was to disable the keyboard sounds. But then, months later, I found that those little sounds made a big difference: they provide some feedback as to when the key is pressed. The sounds somewhat compensates the lack of tactile feedback. Of course, real tactile feedback would be better, as for one the sound is not always easy to hear. Would even a soft keyboard with tactile feedback would become as good as a real keyboard? Is this the beginning of the end for keyboards as they are today?

Thanks Erik for your comment to my earlier post Nokia Touch is on the way which triggered this post.

In Europe for 3 weeks

I arrived in Switzerland on Sunday and will be staying here in Europe for the next 3 weeks. Let me tell you this: it is cold here. Very cold, with freezing temperatures (sub-zero °C, sub-32 °F) even early afternoon. I find it hard to believe, but Gérard pretends it is even colder in Ottawa.

Nokia Touch is on the way

We knew it would be coming, and here it is: Nokia announces S60 Touch.

S60 touch user interface comes with support for tactile feedback, which means that there is a physical pulse and feedback when the user taps on the screen.

Nokia's press release is quite dry, as you would expect, so head directly to their concept video.

Do-Dos and Notes Synchronization on the iPhone

When you design a product, hardware or software, making it simple and elegant often equates to making the right choices for the user, and focusing on providing a great experience out of the box. Contrast this with proving many options, considering each one is as good to the next, and letting the user choose.

Apple strives to be on the side of simplicity and elegance. Before Leopard was released, everyone thought that do-dos and notes synchronization would come to the iPhone with the new release of Leopard, because the new mail application in Leopard has those features. But this hasn't happened so far. Synchronization with Mail is now possible on the Mac side, but what about Windows? Apple can't ignore Windows. Can they provide a different, inconsistent behavior on Windows? Most likely they don't want to? Could Apple be planning something as wild as a version of their Mail application for Windows?

IntelliJ: Showing Unversioned Files

Q: With IntelliJ, how do you know what are the files you have on your disk, but that are not checked in your Subversion repository?

A: Simple, go the menu Windows, Tool Windows, Changes. In the Changes window, make sure you are looking at the Local tab. There you will have the list of the files you have on disk, but that are not checked in. You can see this as a flat list, or organized by directory, as shown in this screenshot.

Google Sites: Competition to Basecamp

I have been writing on how much the newly announced Google Sites looks like a potential competitor to 37 signal's Basecamp. This looks to be even more the case reading from the notes Andrew Miller took during a presentation by Googler Scott Johnston (emphasis mine):

Based on JotSpot collaboration tools, Sites will allow business to set up intranets, project management tracking, customer extranets, and any number of custom sites based on multi-user collaboration.

Google Apps is currently priced per user, which works well for intranets. But it won't for an extranet collaboration tool: you don't want to have to pay something extract for each additional person who has access to the site. Basecamp charges by project, which makes sense. Let's see how Google reconciles Google Apps per-user pricing model with the per-site or per-project pricing model that makes more sense for extranets.

Sleep is Good, Gets You to Live Longer

We all know that getting enough sleep is essential to our well-being. But read to this:

Those who had cut their sleeping from 7 hours to 5 hours or less faced a 1.7 fold increased risk in mortality from all causes, and twice the increased risk of death from cardiovascular causes.

This is according to a study by the University College London Medical School in London quoted in Dr. Razavi blog.

A 1.7 fold increased risk in mortality sounds a lot, but what does this mean exactly? Were the people getting less sleep 1.7 times more likely to die during the time of the study?

Some iPhone Love

I seems I have been fairly critical of the iPhone in the past. Most of my comments have triggered by the disconnect between what the iPhone is today, and what it could have been. But don't get me wrong: I do consider the iPhone to be a fantastic device. And I do even more so today. Let me tell you why.

As you might have noticed by the lack of traffic here, I was lucky enough to be on vacation last week (more on this later!). I was traveling without my laptop but not without my iPhone. And for a whole week I have been have able to keep up with my email and blog reading, all from the iPhone. Even if have been using the iPhone for a few months now, I have been struck by 2 things:

1. After one week of writing all my email on the iPhone I became much faster with the iPhone soft keyboard. I have been using a two-finger technique, with the two thumbs doing the typing and the rest of the fingers holding the phone. I feel that I am now as fast with the iPhone as I used to be with my Nokia E62, a Blackberry type of device that comes with a full keyboard. This is something I never expected to be possible with the iPhone soft keyboard.
2. If your email server provides an IMAP access (which is something new for us Gmail users), then the iPhone mail application works quite well. I have been surprised by how well it works while offline (think: in an airplane): it will just transparently send all the commands to the server next time you have a connection. It also can prefetch the body of the messages, so you can read your email or catch up with mailing lists while offline. Let me tell you: I've done plenty of email on those planes!

And of course, but this is nothing new, Safari is a blast. It is just much better than everything else I have seen on any other phone. Overall, the iPhone has been a very solid device, and I am not convinced that any other phone would have done a better job.

Terrain in Google Maps

I have been wishing for Google to add topo maps to Google Maps. That hasn't happened yet, but we are getting closer with the addition of a terrain layer to Google Maps. Sweet!

Now Google, what about about a real topo maps layer? I would think this shouldn't be a big deal, especially in the U.S. where the data is provided for free by the USGS. If Microsoft can do it (see an example on TerraServer), shouldn't Google be able to do it as well?

A Cluttered Desk is Good for You? I don't think so!

Einstein supposedly said:

If a Cluttered Desk is a Sign of a Cluttered Mind, What's an Empty Desk a Sign Of?

I wouldn't take this as a call to make your desk more cluttered. What works for Al Gore or for Einstein most likely won't work for you. This because we are bad at multitasking, even worse than most of us think we are. We work the best when we can stay focused on a particular task for a period of time. A cluttered environment encourages the opposite behavior: it puts right in your face invitations to do something else.

Google, Online Collaboration, JotSpot, and Basecamp

Google will be soon launching a new service, Google Sites, based on their acquisition of JotSpot. This will make Google's online collaboration offering for businesses even stronger.

The word on the street for some time has been that Google is the new Microsoft. If Google doesn't already compete with you today, they sure will tomorrow. Talking about online collaboration tools, should 37signals be worried? At Orbeon we are using Basecamp; we have found it to be a great tool, but have been disappointed to the lake of improvements to Basecamp during the last couple of years. Come on guys, it is time for a major update to Basecamp, or others (yes, Google) will soon be providing a more complete and more competitive offering.

URIs Validation in IntelliJ

IntelliJ checks that URI in your XML files are valid. This is a nice feature, except in those cases where you know a URI is valid, but IntelliJ think it isn't and reports an error. For instance, IntelliJ wouldn't know about URIs such as oxf:/apps/myapp/myfile.xml we are using in Orbeon Forms.

Starting with 7.0.2, you can tell IntelliJ to ignore specific URIs you know to be valid:

A preview of 7.0.2 was released just a few days ago, and you can download it from their EAP site. If you are on 7.0.1, you will also get a good number of bug fixes.