Russell Beattie about the Nokia 7610 and LifeBlog(ger)
I bet a lot of people’ve been holding their breath for Russells 7610 review (including me) and overall he seems quite satisfied. He also got a motorola a845 recently (basically the same thing as my a835 but for the us market) and it couldn’t replace his series 60 phone, something i can perfectly understand. Series 60 is certainly the nicest phone os i’ve ever used, can’t wait for the 6630 to ship!
Hot on the heels of his review comes the announcement of LifeBlogger, an interesting desktop app which allows you to publish lifeblog items to your weblog. In his post about Lifeblogger Russell mentions the openness of lifeblogs data storage format: text files for sms messages, image files for photos, an sqlite database for metadata.
Lifeblog is perhaps the only thing i currently miss on my mac. The aforementioned openness (and Lifeblogger, which feeds off of this openness) make me hopeful that at some point in the future mac users might get their lifeblog integration as well. Perhaps nothing official by nokia, but writing a simple frontend to display jpgs, txts and read from an sqlite database doesn’t sound impossible to do for third-party application developers. Just look at mark/space and the incredible missing sync: even though palm dropped mac sync support recently, i think there’s no platform with better integration and sync capabilities for palm os devices than mac os at the moment.
A quick update on my bag situation
Remember that rant about crumpler bags back in march? No? Well, i’m not too surprised.
Just wanted to mention that my unlucky situation’s been more or less resolved, i bought a drop-dead gorgeous mandarina duck bag recently (pictured above) which fits my ibook perfectly. My first mandarina duck, yeh! It’s unpadded, but really lightweight and the tucano second skin should be enough protection (btw, what is it with these italian bag manufacturers and their crappy websites?).
I guess i should also mention that i couldn’t withstand the temptation to buy another crumpler bag, a small mcbains lovechild which also fits the ibook perfectly. It’s almost like all these bags are made for apple laptops. Coincidence? I think not.
So for now i’m quite happy, but that might change as soon as my brother gets his custom f-cut freitag bag. Jealousy to ensue, without a doubt.
Why i waste your time with this post you ask? Just because i happen to love bags, and it’s nice to write about something you love.
Quick & dirty Quicksilver
I’ve been a huge fan and happy user of quicksilver ever since i first heard of it (which was around the time i got my ibook). I mainly use it as a launcher and always had this feeling that it’s far more versatile and that i’m merely scratching the surface of its capabilities. There’s lot’s of documentation available in the online manual, but i’ve always felt overwhelmed by it and never tackled this beast properly. If you’re like me and easily intimidated by lengthy manuals, i recommend reading Quicksilver Freakin’ Rocks @macgamer, in which some features besides the standard option-space launching are described. Option-g to grab the selected file in finder and handle it in quicksilver? Why didn’t anyone tell me about this earlier, i’ll certainly use this a lot! Makes me almost dare reading the whole manual…
Update: just found this nice quicksilver tutorial, it’s for b19, but afaik most stuff should still work in the current beta.
Future and past of mobile services
“Why Mobile Services Fail” is an interesting article @thefeature by Howard Rheingold. It outlines four (more or less) promising ideas by Scott Jenson, design team leader for the uiq interface, for innovative mobile services.
There’s some interesting stuff in there, mostly about reinventing interface paradigms. I especially like the notion of treating rich mms messages as some sort of gift.
I don’t get what’s new about the virtual shoulder tapping thing, though. Basically he proposes “empty” sms messages which only contain the name of the sender and the time as some sort of 21st century virtual shoulder tapping. Perhaps i’m missing something here, but this has been more or less possible ever since i got my first cellphone, a trusty siemens s6 way back in 1998. I don’t know how things are in other countries, but here in austria all sms messages carry sender-id in the form of a cellphone number and a timestamp, and any phone i ever played around with matches phone-numbers in your addressbook with this sender information. Just send an empty sms to any number and you already have your virtual tap feature. Of course this only works with people who have your number in their addressbook, but i don’t think most people are eager to virtually tap a stranger on the shoulder.
This “virtual tapping”-thingy also reminded me of a really annoying practice i only heard about, but never indulged in: some people used to call each other, let it ring once or twice, than hang up, to signal that they were thinking of you. Thanks to caller-id (and again phonebook matching) you also knew who and when called you to show his sympathy, pretty much the same thing as the virtual tapping as described by Jenson, but with the huge benefit of being entirely free of charges. This goes a long way if you’re a teenager on a tight budget and an expensive pre-paid plan. I heard about this at least five years ago and i don’t know if teenagers still do this, but thinking of it, this is one hell of a neat (yet somehow annoying) real-life hack…
And while i’m on the topic of mobile services, i’d like to point out Possible, Powerful, Popular and Practical: Mobile Thoughts at 3 a.m. by Russell Beattie, in which he struggles to determine the right target platform for new mobile killer-apps. Build for the most common denominator (sms, wap 1.0) or build for the future (mms, j2me, native symbian, xhtml, …)? No real conclusions, but lots of interesting and valuable questions.
