For a very long time I have resisted getting any personal information-type gizmos like the Palm pilot, pocket PCs, even the Treo that I finally had forced on me by my work. The reason why? All of these devices are dumb. They make me work way too hard to get any sort of utility out of them. I have to spend too much time shoehorning what I want to do into the way they want to interact with me.

Of course, I would really like a good personal information doohickey.

But I want to be able to talk to it. I want to be able to tell it things I want to remember, when I'm thinking about them. "Expense... cab ride... 10$..." "todo... call Tom about the flooble project and tell him about the gleegom." "grocery list... toothpaste" And I want it to be able to transcribe these notes and pop them into lists.

That's all I really need it to do. But I don't want to have to learn some new way of writing, or to learn how to type accurately on really small buttons with my thumbs. This doesn't mean I'm not willing to learn new tricks if it buys me the ability to enter data more efficiently than by voice. (I'm really looking forward to the day when I can enter and access data by just *thinking* about talking or typing, way faster than I could if I were actually talking or typing.)

Now, it seems I'm not the only one who thought about this... a device/interface called VoiceNotes was written about by Lisa J. Stifelman, Barry Arons, Chris Schmandt, and Eric A. Hulteen in 1993. And it's pretty spot-on with the things I want to do. I really really wish that it were out right now. I'd pay a lot of cash for it. Well, I would if it worked transparently and didn't require me to lug some 10-pound hardware monstrosity around. But even then I'd think about it.

I'm sure it's no mean feat... crafting a really good conversational speech interface and coming up with really good speech recognition ain't exactly easy. But having it would mean like not having any interface at all. Most of the time when I'm working with software I'm thinking... "Yes, I think your interface is really cool, but I just wish it would go away"

From there, it's a fairly simple step to getting really powerful, like it learning to really understand the lists, categorize them automatically, spontaneously help you remember things, interact with other systems to accomplish what I want to do (like pre-ordering my groceries so I can just go pick them up).

Now THAT'S what I call productivity software.
posted on 2/13/2004 10:13:00 PM

Jared Tarbell's Gallery of Computation at complexification.net is, well, the biz. Wonderful wonderful stuff. If I were a rich man I would pay him lots and lots of money to continue doing what he's doing. As anyone who has read this blog (has anyone?) is already aware, I'm really enamored of computational art, visualization, and the possibilities provided by computers as an art tool. His Moonlight.Soyuz (a visualization of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata) is the closest thing I've seen to what I've imagined when thinking about visualizing source code. So naturally I think he's a pretty sharp guy.

He also has some pretty astonishing stuff on Levitated.net as well. For instance, the simply beautiful Sea Thing

I followed a link from Jared's site to Bit-101.com, where there seems to be some very interesting stuff going on.

It warms my heart to see that lots of these computational artists are starting to mess around with Processing. It's fun, and it's Good For The Kids.
posted on 2/04/2004 10:23:00 AM