O’Reilly also has this video that shows how much cooler multitouch has become in just a year. Go back to my original multitouch post and have a look at the video there. Now, Multitouch is a whole wall.

(Click through too se the video)

But – and this is an important but – there’s still no real OS behind it. When will we see a real operating system using this? The iPhone already has multitouch on it, but that’s only a small screen. And on a closed system: You can’t develop your own apps using multitouch on the iPhone (yet). My guess: Within a year.

Revolutionary

As I was sorting lots of old photos on a table today, this image of me doing the same thing digitally on a wall came to mind. Fast-forward a year or three. Huge LCD-screens are now at a price level where people not driving Ferrari can afford them. So you got your 100″ LCD-screen. Multitouch is now integrated in the OS, and you bring up the photos from the last month in Aperture 2008. All the pictures are in a pile in the middle. You start dragging them into piles according to themes you see. Change them around. See new combinations. Move again. Zoom in on a picture to see details. Zoom out again. All while standing in front of this gorgeous screen and using the best tool ever existed on earth: The hands of a human.

I think Steve Jobs was absolutely right when he compared multitouch to the mouse and the click-wheel at his keynote in January, 2007:

We have been very lucky to have brought a few revolutionary user interfaces to the market – the mouse, the click wheel, and now Multi-Touch.

And just as with the iPod, we don’t see the huge changes this will make. I think multitouch will change the way we use computers, a revolution.

Try this: If you know kids that use a computer, watch them find their way around on it, play games etc. They are fast. It’s second nature for them.

Now watch the same kids playing; Lego, toys, dolls, puzzles, drawings – whatever their favourite is. If they like to draw, and do it a lot, watch how fast they move their hands, change the angle, move the paper, grab a new pen or crayon, put it back and pick a new one. It’s like they don’t watch their hands at all: It just moves around. Precise and fast. Watch kids who build with Lego – look how fast they find tiny pieces, pick them up, turn them in the right position, position them and make something.

Your hands are 100x superior to your computer mouse. Or tablet, trackpad etc.

Of course, you still will be able to write your name lots nicer with a pen than with your finger. And you still will need special input devices for special tasks: Like a shuttlewheel for video editing, a tablet for illustration.

But for lots of the things we now use a mouse on the computer, using your finger is much better. I move around the screen much faster on the Powerbook, than on the MacPro, because of the trackpad. And the trackpad is only one finger! Or actually two, as two fingers scrolls the screen. The thing I miss the most when I’m working on the MacPro, is the two-finger scrolling on the trackpad. Very intuitive and time-saving.

Which apps?

I want Final Cut Pro with multitouch: Zoom in and out on the timeline. Move clips around on the timeline. Trim or expand with two fingers. Mix the sound with 10 fingers, right on the screen. Manipulate videos in 3D space. Colorcorrect.

Aperture with multitouch: Make stacks of pictures on a virtual table. Sort. Mix. Change. Zoom in and out. Retouch or colorcorrect. Drag pictures into albums. Move them around. A lot. And really fast.

Soundtrack Pro with multitouch: Expand loops. Timestretch and pitch change. Mixing again. Tapping the rhythm to change tempo. Same thing with Logic. Tap different drums. Play a piano right on the screen for easy note entry without your keyboard with you. With real chords.

And Finder with multitouch! Move files around. Stack them and sort them. Zooming and panning on a huge desktop.

Suddenly the worlds most advanced OS, Mac OS X, seem so old-fashioned and restrained…

Update: Multitouch Logic

Infinite Loop at Ars Technica is on to similar thoughts:

Basically the rumor is this: There will be no Logic 8. The successor to Logic 7 will have a new name. The unnamed application will be 10.5 only and will work with a new line of touch sensitive Apple displays. Also, it will be an OMG PROTOOLS KILLER!@!!

I’d love to throw out ProTools. Talk about overrated!

Tynonym: Definition. So what is a tynonym? It’s a word that you get as a suggestion on your mobile phone when you spell a word with T9 on.

January 10th, 2007 “Ksimsarian” made a new entry in Wikipedia, about T9onym:

A T9onym is a word that shows up on mobile phones that have T9 text entry that is equivalent through T9 to other words. T9onyms appear by pressing number keys while in T9 mode. For example, Bus and Cup are T9onyms. Other examples are If and He, Book and Cook, Sophie and Roshi. T9onyms can usually be reviewed and selected by placing the cursor at the end of the word and pressing the * (star) key to select an alternate T9onym. T9onyms are slang for those words generated through T9, in general these are referred to as textonyms.

(History for the Wikipedia page here.)

Update

The T9onym page on Wikipedia has been deleted by The_Epopt. Oh, well. I don’t bother to ask why. Some Wikipedia people are really stubborn, and I really don’t care. If you have the time, ask him why. And feel free to comment her if you figure out why… Now back to the original article…

I’m just curious: Did anyone hear about T9onyms before it showed up on Wikipedia?

Jason Kottke writes about it today:

As books are decidedly uncool, you might wonder how this usage came about. Book is a T9onym of cool…both words require pressing 2665 on the keypad of a mobile phone but book comes up before cool in the T9 dictionary, leading to inadvertent uses of the former for the latter.

Hey, Jason. Didn’t you get my tip in November?

Update 1: Google research

Found a couple of links in Google when searching for T9onym, and yes, in in this messy post, quite a bit down, there’s this:

Hi Guys,
I wanted to know if there is word for ‘like-typed’ words on a mobile phone using T9.

For example, to type Cool you need to press 2665. This combination also gives you Book and Cook.

Also, certain combinations give you antonyms. For example, to type Reject, you need to press 735328. This also results in Select. Is there a word for this?

Can we call these words T9onyms?

Cheers,
Mayur

Great word: T9onym. It’s easier to say Tynonym, but I guess T9onym makes it easier for (at the least for the more nerdy) people to understand what it is. So I credit Mayur for the word.

Update 2: Coudal

On Coudal today:

Lovely coinage. T9onyms. Pronounced “tynonyms,” two words made by texting the same numbers on a cell phone pad. jc-today

(link to archived post and screenshot on Flickr)

Great idea: Write it T9onyms, pronounce it “tynonym”. Although English teachers will go bananas…

2) The iTunes store has sold two billion tracks or so, has a system that works, and has their frontend (iTunes) installed on the majority of computers sold the last couple of years…

Add these together, and you have the perfect portable book reader. Here’s what Booksquare thinks:

We’ve noted in posts past that that an unheralded feature of the iTunes store is the ability to serve up PDF files. Go back and read that sentence again because one key element of the iPhone is its tight integration with iTunes (in retrospect, woefully misnamed). See, if you can browse the web and use iTunes, you can, theoretically, download PDF files. Not a heralded feature, but we have faith in Steve Jobs and his design team.

In other words, you can read lengthy texts. Articles. Short stories. Novellas. Books. Compendiums. On your cell phone/miniature computer/portable media player/killer device.

Setting aside the comfort issues, the iPhone could either kill the nascent e-reader business or take it to new levels. We’ve been saying just about forever that the problem with dedicated e-reader is the fact that the consumer isn’t seeking a device that does only one thing. With its “smart” orientation features, the iPhone could usher in the mass market e-book era.

E-reader to new levels

I have bought quite a few books for my (now retired) Palm Pilot. eReader.com has over 17 000 titles, but reading books on the sharp, but way too small screen on my Sony-Ericsson K800i doesn’t cut it. The Palm had a bigger screen. A lousy screen, but a bigger.

The books are DRM’ed, which of course is a nuisance. But I can live with it. If i WANT to, I get the texts out of the books, but I seldom do.

Tie text and audio together = killer app

Booksquare’s idea is brilliant. If I could buy books for the iPhone in the iTunes store, I would. What if Apple made an app for the iPhone that let you have the same book in both text and audio together? They already sell thousands of audiobooks in iTunes, and if I – for a slightly higher price – could get both audio and text at the same time, that would be a killer. The text could follow the audio when I listen to it, and if I read the text, and later were in my car, the audio version would know where I left reading the text. Let me have a way to set bookmarks with my voice when I listen to the audio version, and let people copy smaller passages and send them by e-mail or by bluetooth. That will help spread the word, and good books will sell more.

The next thing Apple should do with Google: Get all those Google-scanned books into the iTunes store. Let me use Spotlight to search all my books, and give me the most amazing e-reader ever made.

Then Matt Mullenweg wanted some advice on which dress his girlfriend should wear in an upcoming wedding:

(original Flickr posts here and here.) And the winner was the dress on the left. The jury is still out on Matt’s tie…

This is the new web: Communicating with others, and letting you decide. Just as Time Magazine have figured out too too:

In 2006, the World Wide Web became a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter.

The “help me decide” tag

What if we tag all posts like this “helpmedecide” – in one word and no spaces? Tag your posts for Technorati (tag: helpmedecide), your bookmarks for Del.icio.us (tag: helpmedecide) and your pictures for Flickr (tag: helpmedecide) (and similar services).

I’ve created a Flickr group for this. So if you want the world to help you decide, just take pictures of the different choices you have, and make a new thread in the Flickr group. Buying a house? A car? A dress? Can’t decide on the christmas presents? We’ll help you decide!

And feel free to post links to posts and pics in the comments. I’ll promise to vote!

Automatic syncing of household digital content. Any device on the network that buys a song, TV show, or movie from the iTS will inform the server of its purchase; a specialized iTunes iServ app will make a copy of all content purchased on authorized household systems. This copy will serve as both an archive, as well as a source for streaming or copying the file to other authorized devices.

Exactly. I said:

It is used as a central for all media of the different Macs in the house. It stores backups of all pics in iPhoto, all music in iTunes and everybodys documents in general. When someone enters new music on their Mac, it’s sent to the family Xserve so others can use it, both in iTunes and on their iPods.

Just this evening I have been IMing Eirik for a long time about solutions for sharing thousands of pictures between several computers. This is a quite common scenario in modern families. You have parents and kids who all have photos that belong to several groups:

• The ones all in the family would like to have on their Macs all the time, both on portable and not portable machines.
• The ones that you just want to keep for yourself.
• The ones that you want to share with just one other.

And so on.

As far as I know, there are no solutions that does this. Add backup that works flawlessly and syncing between machines, and you have a huge project that I really hope half of Cupertino is working on (the other half, please keep working on FCP 6 please). Add music, video and recorded tv, and you need a very clever system to keep this clean and simple.

What features would you like to see in the Xserve Home? Or iServ?

Which made me think of a new word I’ve made up: Tynonym. I googled it and found only two hits, both of which I think is just spelling errors.

Tynonym: Definition

So what is a tynonym? It’s a word that you get as a suggestion on your mobile phone when you spell a word with T9 on.

As you may know, T9 is a system that most mobile phones use, that make it easier to type words faster. You don’t have to press “8-7-9-9-9-4-4-4-6-6-4″ to spell “typing”, but just “8-7-9-4-6-4″ and T9 figures out that it was “typing” you were going to write.

When I type “typing” with T9 on, I also get a second suggestion, the word “typhoi”. Which makes typhoi a tynonym for typing. Get it?

My built-in OS X dictionary doesn’t know typhoi, there’s no entry at Wikipedia, but Google has 3,200 hits and also suggests “typhoid”, which is a word I know. So T9 thinks I’m about to write typhoid but not pressed the final “d” yet.

Some other words and their tynonyms:

Dog. Tynonyms are fog, eng, doi, enhl, emi, foi and eni.
Cat. Tynonyms are act, bat, abu, cau, cav, acu and bau.
Mobile. One tynonym: Mobilf. ???
Web. Tynonyms are yea, wea, zea and zeb. Lots of odd words!
Sex. Tynoyms are sew, pew, rew and rey.
Apple. No tynonyms!
Microsoft. Ditto: No tynonyms.
Internet. Tynomyns are intermet (what is intermet??) and governet!

Obviously some of the tynonyms for the shorter words are only the first three letters of longer words. It’s also interesting to see whether a word is first in the list or not when you type it. Like “cat”, which was only second in the list, while “dog” were first. This will change from phone to phone and person to person as the T9 software (I think – does anyone know for sure?) notice if you choose a word further down the list all the time, and then move it up the list.

Your suggestions

Do you have some examples of funny tynonyms? Maybe tynonyms that mean the opposite of the word you’re trying to type? Post them in the comments below.

Finally: When I type “tynonym” on my phone, I get no suggestions. So tynonym doesn’t have a tynonym…

Note the little RSS icon after the URLs (I should probably make a better mockup with the new feed icon).

Now, in Mac OS X 10.5, coming early 2007, there’s an dedicated API for RSS inside the OS X. Which means that every app in OS X can get and display RSS feeds, if programmed right.

Having a display in my IM program that shows new posts for my contacts is a great idea (I use Adium X – you’ll find my nick on the about page). But I want to manage these feeds in my Address book. That way, all programs using the people in my Address book can use the feeds associated to each person.

Waiting for spring 2007 takes to long. I would like David Watanabe that makes NewsFire to make a new function for NewsFire. Scan all contacts in the Address book, find all URLs, load up these URLs and find the feeds for these pages, make a special folder in NewsFire called “Contacts”, then make a sub-folder for each contact, and put the RSS feeds for each contact in the right folder. That sounded a lot more complicated than I think it would be, but I’m not a programmer. So how about it, David?

Lots of my friends and contacts use sites sites like Flickr, Del.icio.us or LiveJournal. They have blogs, Amazon wishlists, and Upcoming pages. All this is possible to enter in the Addressbook app in Mac OS X 10.4. As of this version (or was it 10.3?), you can assign as many webpages to a user as you like.

…

Now, checking all my friends and contacts blogs, new pictures, fresh bookmarks etc. takes time. And what better are computers for, than doing the boring stuff that you don’t want to do yourself? What I would like is to add a RSS button to all of these links.

Today HardMac has posted lots of screenshots from the coming 10.5 Leopard. On page 4 you can read this:

Leopard integrates a RSS engine which can be utilised by every application (dedicated API). Thus mail has also become an RSS reader.

This is interesting. What is stopping Apple from adding RSS inside the Address Book too? Have a look at it and tell me what you think. I would love to have this functionality. Since I wrote the original article it seems like everyone has got a blog, a Flickr account, a photocast, podcast or videocast. Having all this info tied to persons makes sense to me. If Apple doesn’t make this, maybe someone else could make it? As a plugin for the Address Book?

One picture every third day for 20 years is about 2 000 pictures. 66 seconds in NTSC, about 80 in PAL. I’m looking forward to see the first one…

Matt explains at Digg how he did it:

I plugged the digital camera (power) in to the wall socket, placed the camera on some books on the dresser, and then used to some other books (always the same ones) to square the bottom books / camera up with the dresser so that it was always in the same position…it was actually a two person job. Because you are right, we ended up bumping it (no matter how careful we were) and needing to take the camera down because sometimes we’d know folks would be coming over and might see the camera set up (we hadn’t told folks at this point) and either figure out Carlin was pregnant.

We basically dedicated the camera to sit there for this project. I used my old SLR to take normal photos and later on the digital video camera we bought could also take decent stills.

Eirik did something similiar some time ago, just with the view outside his window.

Update A Digg user tells that this has been done before – in the 1998 short movie “7 seconds to Sophie” watch on Atom films), and even used in the beginning of the movie Amélie. Still: This is Matt’s wife and HIS daughter growing in there. What a lovely memory to keep.

I wish more books came with blank pages. More space for notes. Books like “Blink” and “Freakonomics” – books that triggers tons of ideas as I read them.

Maybe Moleskine could do some research: Which books would be popular with their biggest fans? Wouldn’t it be cool to have “Blink” with the Moleskine black binding, and lots of extra blank pages? Two extra blank pages after each big idea. Six extra pages after each chapter. And tabs included to mark those special pages. I would buy it. All my books are full of notes and drawings. Books are to be used.

The site should be bulit up around usergenerated content like blogs and videos, hoping to become the public service version of MySpace.com. BBC also plan to their entire programme catalogue online.

Ashley Highfield, BBC director of new media and technology says the new site will allow users to “create your own space and to build bbc.co.uk around you”, according to Guardian Unlimited.

At any time you will be able to download any programme from the eight BBC channels and watch it on your PC and, we hope, move it across to your TV set or down to your mobile phone to watch it when you want.

Either the BBC plans a new clever DRM model, or they simply drop the whole DRM thing and let their users do what they want with their programs. If the latter is true, it will be a whole new way of thinking from a major broadcasting company. And a way of thinking that will challenge other public service channels and also commercial channels.

See what other quality sites say about this at TailRank.

Search

BBC today also unveiled a search engine with everything they made: Their own words: “Info about every single BBC programme, ever. It’s a vast catalogue, but it’s not comprehensive. A guarantee of accuracy. We’re very proud of it, but we know there are mistakes.”

Creative future

Now, imagine if all DRM and copyright rules were dropped for one month. All over the world.

Just copying others work and selling it would still be illegal. But making your own versions… Editing it. Adding. Subtracting. Changing. Mix. Fix.

What would happen?

The world would see the most creative month in the history of the world.

Yes, lots of money would be “lost” for the people holding copyrights.
Yes, it would be impossible to change the rules back after a month. Because the results would be mindboggling.
Yes, it would the legal mess the size of Jupiter.

But if I’m elected “One ruler of all humans and planets orbiting the sun”, I would gather the wisest women, men and dolphins on the planet and have them think how this can be done – letting creative people still make lots of money. And at the same time let you and me explore and find new ways to use all the signals surrounding us.

The Wellness System is made up of hardware, software, and cutting-edge technologies linked to exercise equipment. It enables health and fitness facilities to deliver a rich wellness experience to their members. A comprehensive, modular network, the Wellness System works with exercise equipment.

Using a special TGS key, you “log on” to the equipment you use at the gym. The Wellness System then keeps track of what you do, burned calories, how much you run, how much you lift or pull, and your progress. You can also check your progress online.

Only halfway there

As far as I know the first time you can see your progress in hard numbers, and not just what you think your progress is (and DO people fool themselves? Yes, they do.)

There are however some shortcomings:

It can store “only” 365 workout sessions. I guess that means several years of workouts for most of us, but for athletes it will soon be too little.

Is there a way to measure your pulse? I couldn’t find that on the Technogym site.

You can’t take your data with you. And you can’t use the data from the gym with the data from outside the gym. Let me explain: You run, bicycle and lift in the gym. And your data is stored in the Wellness System. Then you run and bicycle outdoors, and maybe you store your data on a Garmin Forerunner.

How do you combine the data? You can’t. There aren’t any standards. And most of the people busy making new cool standards for the online world are so busy using their computers that they wouldn’t care less if you can’t take your Wellness System data, your Forerunner data and mix them at home. Or online.

We need EMIL

A year ago, I wrote “Running and training online”:

I’m always frustrated with the lack of open standards in the computer world. So to keep up competition, we make a standard for the data that the training machines collect when we train. I call it EMIL – Exercise Machine Interchange Language. It sounds like “e mill” (electronic mill) when you say it. And it’s my little homage to Astrid Lindgren’s wonderful character Emil.

So how about it, Marc? Phil? (who had supercool “/run” but still makes cool stuff at “Make:”. Or Robert?: Your boss seem to understand that we need microformats. We need a format for training! Get people out of their chairs! Hightech training for everyone!

And finally: The view

The next version of Windows is called “Vista”:

vista

1) A distant view or prospect, especially one seen through some opening
2) A site offering such a view

(from Wiktionary)

I want something to look at when running the mill. Ok, at SATS where I workout, they have placed the step machines right in front of the running mills. But everywhere else. I would like to bicycle through Italian wineyards or downtown Sydney. I want to run the streets of Tokyo or the hills around Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Or the landscapes in Halo.

How?

Make a system that takes data from the bicycle or the mill, feed it into my Xbox (or a PS3) and give me the view. Track how fast I go, my pulse, put it online. Let me race my friends all over the world. Give me EMIL support in all chat clients: “Status: Oyvind is bicycling – race him now”. Click and your system give you the same track I see, real time and online. And it works whether I’m at the gym or at the spinning bike at home.

How cool would that be!

Summary

There are three pieces missing:

Data collection
Technogym has started to adress this, by taking data from all machines in gyms, and saving them to a personal profile. Garmin also does it with their Forerunner line, where you store both pulse, elevation, speed, GPS data etc. on the Forerunner.

There are several other areas where this could be done:

• A very light device to put on your arm while playing tennis
• A device for golfers that takes GPS data, how you swing etc. (I would guess this exists already? Anyone?)
• A device for skiers, both Nordic and Alpine. A GPS with customized software would cover most of what you need. I think lots of people would like to see their speed in the slopes, which could be done with GPS. Not too accurate, I guess but good enough. If there was a standard, the Alpine devices could talk to systems in the slopes, feeding them other metadata about the slopes (green, blue, red, black etc.)
• Swimming. Are there heart rate monitors that are waterproof?

Can you think of other useful areas?

A standard for the data
There should be an easy way to move data between devices and systems. It’s lame that my Polar heart rate monitor store it’s data in a different format than Garmin’s heart rate monitors. They should be compatible with each other.

There should be a way to put all the data from Technogym’s Wellness System on a USB stick.

Someone should sit down and define all the data possible to connect: GPS positions, heart rate, how much you lift or push, how far you run/bicycle/ski and so on. And then define a data format for it. Like MIDI for training machines and monitoring.

Using data to control other devices
And finally: When the data is in a format that all kinds of machines and gadgets can understand, it should be possible to use it to control other devices. Example: When I run on a mill, that data should be possible to send to any PC/Mac/Xbox/PS to control things. Anything. It should be built right into the OS. Yes, OS X and Windows Vista should have supoort for this. So that if I want to “disconnect” the return key on my keyboard, and the only way to get a “return” is to hit a punching ball next to my display, I should be able to do it.

And when I’m running on a tread mill, in a gym or at home, I should be able to control any game I have. Or much better: The game developers should make special versions of the games, with “only” the landscapes and buildings, letting users run or bicycle them.

Update
There is a device for alpine, showing vertical speed etc.

Update
I’ve written Training microformat after Apple and Nike presented iPod+Nike in May 2006.

“What’s pissing me off is that it uses so little of my body. You’re just sitting there, and it’s quite boring. You’ve got this stupid little mouse that requires one hand, and your eyes. That’s it. What about the rest of you? No African would stand for a computer like that. It’s imprisoning.”

Africa is still far away…

And now it’s 2006. Still no Africa in your computer. Maybe even worse than before. People sit still for hours and hours, using four fingers and their eyes locked at 45 cms. Bad bad.

So StepUI from Microsoft is a step (pun intended) in the right direction.

There are lots of dance pads and alternative input devices out there. But the OS need to be able to use them in an effective way, or nobody will use them. I hope Microsoft and Apple will implement these things, and not just make fun projects of them.

EMIL!!!!!!

Also have a look at what I call EMIL – Exercise Machine Interchange Language, a new standard for storing data from exercise machines (treadmills etc.) and moving them between different machines and online storage.

vCard

So I got an idea. And if it already exists, feel free to tell me in the comments below! Here’s the idea: My Mac has an Adress book with my contacts, and my own adress data. I can export any person as a vCard and e-mail that to someone. When the person who receives my vCard clicks on it, it will open the default contact manager and put my data in there.

This works on any modern OS, Macs and PCs. Most modern laptops also have 802.11. Or WiFi. Or Airport. Many names.

Broadcast it!

I would like to have a meny item under the Airport icon in OS X. It should read: “Broadcast vCard”.

What it does is to listen for other’s sending me their vCards, and also sending out mine. When it finds them, the OS show me a list of who else did this around me, and let me check off which ones I allow to get my card. The others in the room do the same. This is to prevent anyone else around to get all our vCards without our permission. Like this:

It’s crude, but you get the picture. What do you think? Would this be useful? Would it be hard to put this on OS X or XP/Vista?

Update
Now this is “almost” possible. See Bonsoir, here’s my vCard.

In an e-mail interview, Mark Cuban, Dallas Mavericks owner and the co-founder of Broadcast.com, said he has been impressed with Synergy but was “only surprised that it took this long” for a service like this to emerge.

True. Why did it? The concept of tagging things is amazingly simple and still very effective. Now coaches in NBA teams can search any tag and combinations of tags and get video of their team up on their screen. Find “3-point lastminute leftside” or whatever.

Tagging tv

Now let us take this a step further. What if you could search for anything a broadcaster (like NBC in the USA, or BBC in the UK) broadcasts? Search for “laughter” and you get every good joke that made people laugh, in a talk show, a movie, a sports programme etc. Search for “shot”, “goal”, “kiss”, “man”, “woman”, “joke”, “sad” and so on.

Is it possible? Is there a business in this? Why would someone want to do this? Sales? Reuse of material in new programmes? I just find it fascinating, and I would like your comments on what this could be used for.

Tagging movies

What if videos had a system where people could tag them? Ok, let’s say that IMDB.com (Internet Movie Database) made a system where every scene in a movie were listed under the movie. And the movie companies let them do this. They were not to whow the actual movie, just a picture illustrating the scene. Then people could add tags to that scene. “Carchase”, “man”, “sun”, “orange”, “horse”, “Kim Basinger” etc. I’m pretty sure that lots of people would tag their favourite movies in no time.

What could we use these tags for later? Sales? Rentals? Dating? Any ideas?

This database then could be used for rentals, and soon internet downloads. Amazon.com has added tagging of the products they sell, but you can only add tags to the whole product. Would it be useful if you could tag chapters in books?

“I like Flickr. I like blogs. I like search. I like the fact that my daughter is going to knit her own ipod sock. Maybe next year she can exhibit at MacWorld and give me a free pass. .

In that light, I hear that MacWorld might have been better called MacWorld Accessories. Is there a fashion show next year?

Maybe we could call it MacFash. .”

This is something for Anina: Arrange the first gadget, computers and fashion show: With all the cool iPod accessories, mobile phones by fashion designers, software for creation of digital art and fashion, and clothing for the digital lifestyle.

Some examples:

The Burton Audex
The Levis RedWire DLX jeans
The Giro Tuneups II system (lame Flash interface, click snow, then helmets, then accessories)
Elite Model Look mobile phones

And of course a million different designers doing iPod cases with everything from polyester, via knitted socks to $30,000 with diamonds.

How about it, Anina? In Paris? The first MacFash? Or maybe TechFash?

But that’s not what this is about. But the ability to watch the best gamers in the world race anytime inside the game:

“Enter Gotham TV—here’s were things get interesting. Inside this mode you’ll find the Heroes Channel, your Friends Channel, a gallery of your snapshots, and also your recorded replays. The Heroes Channel (…) provides you with viewing access to the Top 50 racers in the world (on Live). If you’re watching a race you can hop in and out of the perspectives all of the cars that are racing, utilizing the different view modes and camera options available. The Heroes Channel has tested up to 300,000 viewers watching a single race.”

The Heroes Channel will be very popular. People will want to watch the best players in the world driving. It will compete with “normal” tv-channels.

And after watching amazing races in PGR3, with cameras everywhere, what will happen when you watch normal races? They need to be TOP quality. Lots of cameras. Superslows. Inboard cameras. Everything you got used to in the games. Same goes with other sports. People will of course want to see the real thing. But the games will compete more and more.

The next logical step would is to let people watch the real games on their game consoles as they happen. Let me play WRC with Solberg and Loeb live as they drive. Let me sail the Volvo Ocean Race with the boats – live. Let me cycle the Tour de France with Lance.

Let me watch replays from games on the game console. With my own choice of camera angles. Let me see Superbowl on the Xbox 360 or PS3. Whenever something happens, I can use the console to see the situation from every possible angle. Add some microchips in the shoes, gloves and t-shirts of the players. And the ball. FIFA is already doing tests with a ball with a small chip inside to signal to the referee when it is a goal. So the technology is already there.

My bet: Superbowl 2007 will be live on Xbox and Playstation.

Also read my article about running and training online – on how to make it possible to compete with Lance Armstrong and Sebastian Loeb with your Xbox or PS3.

Sponsors:

But that doesn’t mean that it can’t be improved. Being an avid Flickr and Del.icio.us user, I have fallen completely in love with tags. Tags are – in my opinion – the most clever concept that has been introduced on the net the last years. It gives you and me a fast and easy way to organize bit amounts of data.

You may have read my post about tagging, smart folders and getting things done here on brilliantdays.com. I use this technique a lot, and the excellent Tagbag! widget by Benedikt Terhechte helps me find my tagged documents, files and folders without setting up lots of smart folders “manually”.

Now it’s time for software developers to start adding tags inside their apps. And my first candidate is NetNewsWire. I would like to be able to add tags for each feed I subscribe to.

Examples

43folders gtd, gettingthingsdone, productivity, mac, osx
Adam Curry podcasting, technology, personal
Apple Hot News mac, software, apps, osx
Boingboing weird, security, blogging, future, gadgets, geek, hacks

See? These could have been my tags for four of the feeds I subscribe to. The tags could be entered in the infopane for each feed, somewhere here:

Next would be to make smart lists to use my new tags. Smart lists in NetNewsWire works the same way as smart lists in iPhoto and iTunes. I could set up a smart list for the tags I’m most interested in, like “mac”:

Naturally, there’s no category called “tag” in NetNewsWire. For now.

If I could pick just one new feature for the next version of NetNewsWire, tags would be the one. I have added this wish on the Ranchero bugs/feature wish pages. If you know Sheila or Brent of Ranchero, feel free to send them to this post!

Update
Andrew comments (scroll down to see it): “Why tag a static thing like a feed?” I subscribe to lots of feeds, currently over 400. So I use the feature “smart lists” in NetNewsWire a lot. Whenever a feed contains “Final Cut Pro” or “FCP”, it goes to my FCP smart list.

But the word “Final Cut Pro” is not very general. If I set up a smart list with the word “mac”, I will get hundreds, if not thousands of hits. Let me check. Ok, it was 1 386 hits.

So I put all the “Mac” feeds inside a folder, the “Mac” folder. But some of the sites that posts Mac news/stories, also specialize in other subjects too. Like 43folders” that is about David Allen’s “Getting things done”, productivity, moleskine, Mac software, OS X etc.

If I could tag 43folders with these tags, I could make smart lists based on my tags. That way, 43 Folders would go both in the “mac” smart folder and the “gtd” folder.

So when I need to check what’s new on the subject of “Final Cut Pro”, i have to check two places:

1. The smart list searching for the words “Final Cut Pro” and “FCP”
2. The smart list searching for the tag “FCP”

The second one would give me the feeds that normally serve me news on Final Cut Pro, and also the post that don’t contain the word “Final Cut Pro” – but hopefully something that relates closely to Final Cut Pro – the reason why I tagged the feed “FCP” in the first place.

One example to illustrate the difference between 1 and 2:

If you subscribe to the RSS feed of the Phila FCP Users Group, it contains 12 posts at the moment. All of them are related to Final Cut Pro in different ways, but not all of them contain the word “Final Cut Pro” (or “FCP”).

Here are all the 12 posts:

But my “FCP” smart list, searching for “Final Cut” and “FCP” only finds 5 of these:

Now, this isn’t the best example, because I could have added a search for “Final Cut Pro” in the name of the source. When doing that, the “FCP” smart lists catches all 12 posts.

But with other feeds, like 43folders, that wouldn’t work.

If you have suggestions on how to solve this without extra features in NetNewsWire, use the comments under.

All this is possible to enter in the Addressbook app in Mac OS X 10.4. As of this version (or was it 10.3?), you can assign as many webpages to a user as you like.

Here’s an example with some of my own links, in the Adressbook app:

Now, checking all my friends and contacts blogs, new pictures, fresh bookmarks etc. takes time. And what better are computers for, than doing the boring stuff that you don’t want to do yourself?

What I would like is to add a RSS button to all of these links. Like this:

Pressing one of these buttons should take you to the page, grab the associated RSS feed of that page, and display it like Safari always does. Here’s how my Del.icio.us bookmarks look as a RSS feed:

Clicking all my contact’s RSS buttons one by one isn’t much better than checking them manually. So the next step would be to add a command to Address Book that checks all links automatically, and then subscribes to the RSS feeds of them. Here’s my photoshopped new version of the file menu in Address Book app:

I have circled my new command; “Get RSS Feeds…”.

Choosing this command would go through every weblink in the Address Book app, find the associated RSS feed for them, and subscribe to them. It probably would be nice if this was somewehere in the preferences, so Address Book did it automatically for you if you wanted it to.

If you then go into the preferences and check the first check box:

You will now get a new “Address book” bookmark folder in your Safari bookmark bar. As you can see from my next pic, clicking this will give you a list of every web link you have put in your Address Book.

Apple need to make this menu a little nicer. Some suggestions:

• Make an small Address Book icon for it, insted of the full name, to save space in the bookmarks bar.
• Group the bookmarks by contact names. This will make the list shorter, and group all bookmarks of a contact in a sub-menu.

If the Address Book app had a functionality like described here, the “Address Book” bookmark folder would get a number behind it, showing how many new posts my friends and contacts have made since last time I viewed the feeds. Just as the “Apple news” bookmarks folder in the pic above has 65 unread articles.

Every time I start Safari, a neat little Address Book icon would display a number, showing how many posts my contacts have made. Wouldn’t that be cool?!

This tip is submitted to Apple Mac OS X feedback.

Update In version 10.5 of OS X, there is an API for RSS systemwide. So maybe it’s possible to have RSS in the Address Book of Leopard?

I already can log on to the petrol company webpages with my card number, and see exactly how much I have spent on petrol, snacks, car cleaning etc.

What if…: Everytime I fill petrol with my petrol card, the petrol pump asks for the mileage on the car. I enter this the same way I enter my pin code.

Now, at the webpages I can see how much petrol I have used pr. kilometer/mile, how much this changes during the seasons etc.

Some more features: I could enter the model and year of our car and the web page could tell me whether our car uses more or less petrol than the average model.

And every n kilometers, I got get a mail or SMS from the petrol company, reminding me to change my wipers, change the oil, clean my car etc.

I would of course have to give up some privacy for this. I would have to let the petrol company log exactly what I buy, when I fill up, wash the car etc. so they can keep track of when I need new stuff. Which would be ok for me, and not ok for others.

I see it as a win-win situation. I get better car economy, friendly reminders (and possibly targeted offers that saves me some money, but probably makes me buy more…) and a single place to store all my car data.

And the petrol company gets lots of info on how much their customers actually drive, when they do their purchases, and most important: Loyalty. Because if I fill up somewhere else, my “how-many-kilometers-per-litre” system at my petrol company gets wrong. It will miss data. So I need to stick to my usual petrol company.

With bluetooth bulit into lots of cars, maybe the car could tell itself?

Technorati tags: cars / ideas

What if it was MUCH more advanced?

I love my Xbox. Once in a while I hurdle through the streets of Sydney, Chicago, Stockholm, Edinburgh and Moscow in the game Project Gotham Racing 2, beautifully rendered in 3D, with stereo and superb surround sound. Great fun.

Now, all these cities have marathons too: Sydney, Chicago, Stockholm, Edinburgh and Moscow.

Wouldn’t it be great if I could run the same beautiful tracks from PGR2, as I drive on my Xbox?

Combine treadmills with game consoles

Here is how it could work: I sign up for an Xbox live account. And some kind of Technogym (or other manufacturer of training machines) account. When I’m at the gym (or even at home), I use a digital ID to log on. It could be a small wireless keychain or an USB dongle.

When stepping on to the treadmill, my favourite tracks/cities/landscapes (set up on my Xbox or computer at home in advance) pop up on a LCD screen in front of me. It could be a city like in PGR2, or landscapes, which I think most people would prefer. I could run the French Alpes one day, and the treadmill would raise the angle with the terrain. And play the sounds of the landscape; small rivers, birds singing, wind in my hair. Oh, it’s almost as being there. Almost.

Since all machines are online, I could also run with other people at the same track, in real time. I could put on headset (if I’m not too tired too talk) and talk to other runners in other locations all over the world. I could beat Joi in quick run through Ginza. Or race Jason through Central Park. Easy!

My Polar pulse belt would of course send its data to the machines in the gym, and I would be able to see it all on theTechnogym or S.A.T.S. site from home. And see my progress.

Beat Lance Armstrong (with some cheating)

When bicycling at the gym, I could also choose where to go. And I could participate live with real bicyclists. Like the Tour de France and the Giro d´Italia. If the real cyclists wore GPS units in the race (like the rally cars in WRC does, we could race them from our gyms (and the tv-viewers would get lots better statistics on screen). The real cyclists would of course beat the crap out of me. So I get an x1.5 (or rather x10) to my speed. I can bicycle in realtime when the race is on, or later when the riders are in.

Through a venture with other software makers, Technogym could release a software package where I can create my own tracks. And even upload them on the net. I can map the woods next to my house, and use GPS data to get heights and directions. Good tracks are presented on the website. People could vote for best tracks.

Or the gym could match customer data with GPS positions of tracks to give them tracks where they live. Or even make their own tracks and sell them to customers. “Buy London Marathon track, with the new museums added, only Euro 5.99″. Or “Run Central park at night. Gates included! Only US$ 9.99″.

Or places one never could run in the real life. Like the great chinese wall. Or imaginary places: Run through the castle of Hogwarts in Harry Potter. Or the upper decks of Titanic. Or the fields outside Minas Tirith in of The Lord of the rings, running through hords of orcs and other brutal beings (the nice thing is that the software make them jump away with a scared impression when you approach them!) Or flying, so that your running or bicycling translates to engine power in a small plane or some kind of manpowered flying device.

Since all machines are networked, and my digital ID tracks what I’m doing, the gym gets a very good overview of my progress. It tracks how much I have run, how much I have bicycled, lifted, pulled etc. My personal trainer can pinpoint exactly where I need to change something.

Add your favourite tunes…

Maybe I could subscribe to music streams on the machines too. So when I connect on a machine, I get streams of music according to my taste? Maybe my Last.fm stations I already bring my iPod but new music is always nice.

A bicycle or treadmill with an online Xbox system would certainly make training at home lots more fun. Just a plain version where a nice landscape follows the speed on the treadmill or the bicycle would make things much more inspiring. And the fact that I would know where I “left off” last time; “that small house near the river”, and could start off there next time.

I predict that the next big thing in training with machines is online connections. This is good for statistics, I know my progress and I can’t cheat. And it’s pure entertainment: It’s so much more fun running on Venice beach than in my dark basement with the wind howling outside.

All this would of course be connected to some kind of mail and SMS system. So I get reminders on mail or mobile when it’s time to run/lift/cycle/row again. I could make competitions with my friends. The first one to make a 10% progress in weigths. Or run a marathon. Or cycle Paris-Nice. Or increase oxygen intake or whatever. If you add online weights with the same digital IDs, people could weigh themselves at the gym (if weight loss was the issue) and have the results stored online.

Sony/Microsoft and the game producers could sell advertising along the tracks. When running the London marathon on the treadmill, I pass shops and signs with products of my taste. I just tap the panel in front of me to get the offers mailed to me back home.

Make a standard – the new “MIDI” for exercise maschines

I’m always frustrated with the lack of open standards in the computer world. So to keep up competition, we make a standard for the data that the training machines collect when we train.

I call it EMIL – Exercise Machine Interchange Language.

It sounds like “e mill” (electronic mill) when you say it. And it’s my little homage to Astrid Lindgren’s wonderful character Emil.

It defines what kind of training I’m doing (weight loss, muscles etc.), what kind of the body the exercise is for (lifting weights trains the biceps etc.), how many repetitions or how far (12,4 kms on the bicycle), and with what “weigth” (which gear on the bicycle, how many kilos lifted etc). It’s like MIDI for exercise. This way, different producers of training equipment could hook up to the same standard, and people could move their data with them. Software makers could make software that reads the data from the digital IDs or the websites, so people could use their data at home, analyze them, publish them. Companies that make “sporty” mobile phones like the Nokia 5140 and the Siemens M65 – and Garmin that make a special GPS for training – could use the same standard, so that all your training is stored in one single place. The product would be labeled “EMIL enabled”.

The same could be done everywhere else people train and exercise: Squash halls (the unit stores the number of minutes you played, and heart rate if you used a heart rate monitor/belt), ski slopes (measures how many times you did the slope etc.) and swimming (how many meters etc.).

Use the comments section to improve on the idea!

Update
I’ve posted a little update, looking at Brian Eno and StepUI from Microsoft.

Update 2
Technogym has now a system to keep track of your training progress. Read about it here.