Touch your Data

Every App has its own User Interface. This was the promise of Apple's iPhone. No keyboard on your phone--- just a touch screen. Jobs had a point. Every app needs its own User Interface. On a phone or any handheld device is more obvious.

Handheld devices are being used in almost every setting. Take this news from Mobile Computing, with the promise to deliver tablet PCs to the hospital setting.

Imagine, a display only, 13" lcd "tablet"--- no keyboard, just a touch screen, running full speed OS X in all its desktop glory. secure shell to your server? open a terminal.app on your tablet mac and there you go... logging onto your server. oh right, you're in the office with wifi all around... thats ok... your linux server just emailed you the hourly log from /var/log/messages but you have to meet your staff for coffee just across the street, so you're reading the log while sipping coffee in starbucks.

what about the desktop? with the advent of better User Interfaces--- could mark the end of the mouse and quite possibly the keyboard. i'd trade my mouse for touching stuff on my display. The keyboard could quite possibly remain--- for typing reports and such.

We might even see an age where every display follows us. User configurable displays--- based on your function/role in an organization. It sounds very Star Trek-ish, with each LCARS terminal configured specifically for the task at hand but manipulated in a very Minority Report-ish way.

Our machines are becoming faster, more powerful with the arrival of multicores. what are we going to do with all that power? our future machines will allow for better ways of interacting with our data, a more stimulating experience communicating with our friends, family and business contacts.

Future User Interfaces will liberate us from boring device-interfaces and spur creativity in designing appropriate but exciting human-computer interaction. More than ever, every person becomes a node on the network and more importantly, for both work and play, we get to touch our data.

Applegoo

i never open my gmail. ok, almost never, yet my gmail account remains to be my primary email address. in fact, the only reason i keep my yahoo email now is because of my yahoo messenger--- where most of my friends are attached to.

i've taken to using gmail's pop3 features. i've set my gmail account to archive all email after my apple mail has downloaded it. it saves me a browser tab. and i don't have to keep looking at a browser window to see if i have new messages: Apple Mail like every other email client does that for you.

don't get me wrong. i love the clean look and feel of gmail. its functionality is the best with yahoo's new beta the worst of the lot. gmail's clean interface lets me effortlessly search for email--- which i do and hardly the only time i ever open it. that and finding out some obscure email address that hasn't found its way to my computer's contact list.

there is also a way to get your mail through rss but i find rss news readers to be overwhelming, whereas if the message is already with me on Apple Mail... i can simply answer it and gmail's threading identification thingy is somewhat simulated in Apple Mail where related threads are highlighted. Still nothing beats the real thing which really turns your emails into conversations.

I delete all mail i get from my gmail account. why the heck should i keep it together with all the clutter on my hard drive? Google has an archive of my mail online for me to search. So my Apple Mail is empty. Google has done a spectacular job of archiving my email.

if you're interested in using the same work flow click here to visit Gmail Help Center to help you configure your own pop3--- which works for almost every email client in Linux, Windows and the Mac.

Nifty Summarize

Don't have time to read all the stuff being sent to you? Here's one more reason to love (and if you haven't, switch to) Mac OS X! I learned about this feature while watching Mac Break Episode 62: Summarize. Its a nifty little thing that lets you auto summarize any text be it from your web browser, a pdf file.

Select the text you want to summarize like so:


then... click on the menu...



the summary window will come out:


you can set how long the summary would be, by moving the slider and/or selecting the sentence or paragraph buttons like so:


i've tried it with the pdf viewer and it works, and no it doesn't work with Firefox but it does on Camino. This feature works for all cocoa apps.

here's the Camino screenshot:

This cool little tool and apparently has been with OSX for a long time, the boys from Macbreak said.