Random Thoughts

Dreams of the Future

Like everyone else when I first heard about the iPhone I was stoked! An iPod and a cell phone that synced with my computer: what more could I want? Well, as it turns out, lots. And many of those were solved.

• Over-the-Air contacts, calendars, and email
• Applications
• IM
• Facebook
• Webpages
• Etc…

But there is one thing that I feel is missing. And it is something Hollywood seems to have down. I want to be able to take my work with me. If I have a Pages document open I want to simply be able to “drag” it to my iPhone and continue work. If I have an email I want to be able to do the same thing. And honestly, this isn’t that hard (once Apple allows editing of documents). But where this really comes into play is for more common day things like IM conversations or webpages.

Let me paint you a picture: you’re sitting at your desk having a conversation in Adium with a friend. You realise you need to go do some laundry. So you grab your iPhone and launch Facebook (that’s the IM service in question, but the same applies to everything else). The Facebook app now lets you continue the conversation, but without all of the previous messages. That’s fine, you can deal with it. Now half an hour later you get back to your room and want to go back to the computer. You just start typing again in Adium, no problem. Right?

Right. Kind of. In an ideal word I should be able to tell Adium to send over the conversation logs of the current chat (not every single chat ever) to my iPhone so I have the whole thing. And when I get back I can do the same in reverse. Now obviously this would require Adium to have an iPhone app or at least an app that would accept thse logs and continue the conversation.

The thing I have always looked for in mobile devices is for them to be 100% interconnected with my desktop computer. I don’t want to have separate contacts or emails or calendars. And today, I don’t. But no one seems to have thought about this for other applications. And really, they’re still two devices. I think we need to look at Hollywood for inspiration (again).

I’m going to use Star Trek for an example. The Star Trek PADDs are exactly what I want. I can access all of my files from a central database from anywhere, the PADD, a super-awesome multitouch desk, anywhere.

Ok, there’s my required Star Trek reference out of the way.

But back in reality this shouldn’t be all that difficult to implement (don’t kill me programmers, I know that’s your worst nightmare “it should be simple”). I think it really is the next step in integrating out mobile devices with our desktop computers as well as with our other computers.

One last thing: with the iPad all of this will be even better because of the larger screen.

So what are your thoughts on the matter? How do you see the future of mobile computing being integrated with our desktops?

The Future…

Hello world,

Here’s the required test post/ introduction post for this little blog of mine.

Ordinarily I’d just post this to my website but it is outdated and a total mess at the moment. Hopefully I’ll be reopening it as a proper portfolio sometime in the next few months but that portfolio won’t have a blog component in it. That’s is where this blog comes in; it will be the place for me to post a few random articles that I write and maybe post a picture or two.