Tag Archive for 'request'

Addressbook/OSX on Steroiods

Published by dekay on July 7, 2005 in lazyweb and mac. 0 Comments

My last post spawned some ideas for a better, much more integrated addressbook:

  1. Grouping of Contacts: Make a better interface, less a browser but more iconish, where you can drag people around, “duplicate group memberships”, show group overlaps, show which groups a contact belongs to; make it easy to change, add or move. Make it not too easy to accidentally delete a contact completely.

  2. Communication When I open the addressbook there are many reasons why I do it - but the most important one is: communication: either I want to call someone, send them a letter or… no more. Possible. But why stop there, why stop at just displaying that kind of info? Make a button or some other interactive way to communicate with people - like press the “communicate” button and a list of options comes up: any instant messaging capabilities that are available - like:

    • is that person online in AIM, ICQ, Skype? Show those options!
    • do you have an email address of that person? Show a button to send an email!
    • do you have a mobile number and some way to send SMS? Show a button to do so! This requires some forms of plugin technology which should not be a problem with Cocoa and a well documented bundle interface / API. Just let the communication service providers write the plugins! One could even extend that feature even more: I often want to send a file to someone… why not add the ability to drag a file to a contact and then get some options on how to transfer that file - if the contact is online and has some messenger service enabled - send it that way. If there is an email address that can receive a file this big - send it that way. And if there is a too big file or no way - mount that persons server (afp, smb or ftp… even the drop box on any mounted computer or a password protected folder on a .mac account!) or burn a CD. All possibilities start at that one place: drag the file to the contact! Make it really easy and obvious!

  3. Integrate Webservices

    • does the contact have a blog -> show some excerpts from the RSS feed
    • homepage?
    • a del.icio.us account? (via RSS)
    • flickr?
    • add friendster
    • add white pages - to “auto-complete” contact info

  4. Addressbook and/or contact sharing. Just like iTunes, iCal sharing or whatever you like.

  5. MacOSX technologies are great: add the ability to link any item on the computer to a contact. Like a folder that contains project files related to that contact; like tasks and appointments/calendar events that are related to that contact. We are living in a world of networks, of data that is connected. Let us make these connections on the Mac, too! Make it really simple to create links, to “follow the threads of the network”. Show spotlight’s power by giving access to anything related to a contact right there in the addressbook! Emails, Files received, chat logs, web pages/articles, Notes/Agendas…

  6. Make it easy to publish your own data. Auto-update contact info from RSS feeds, attached VCF files.

  7. Publish an RSS feed for any changes to addressbook data! Make it easy to create RSS feeds with certain criteria - completely customizable.

  8. Make the whole system extensible - similar to spotlight where every developer can open their data to indexing. Enable other developers to provide contact related info/data/services - see above for some examples. I can only start dreaming of possibilities: Subethaedit, Delicious Library, all Chat apps, P2P, Photo/Movie sharing, Genealogy, Friendster, multiple recommendation systems, dating websites. Create or use a public, extensible open source protocol for interoperability

  9. Integrate all iApps into this feature! Make it easy to leverage the power of this interconnectivity and of relations between data on your mac!

  10. Access the data of users on the network, on the current machine. Use rendezvous and any directory services that are there to provide “hints of data”.

  11. Make it easy to add pictures to yoir contacts, use any iSights that are there to scan business cards as well as make pictures. Capture pics of video chats ort from mobile phones.

  12. Any more ideas? Who is going to do it?

Trackbacking my own comments elsewehere?

Published by dekay on June 14, 2005 in ideas and lazyweb. 1 Comment

Is there any way I can collect trackbacks/pingbacks of comments I made on other blogs?

Or some kind of tool/bookmarklet where I can do the same thing by hand? e.g. I create a post on my blog where I collect all the comments I make - and then have a bookmarklet I open whenever I comment somewhere and send myself this trackback?!

(I guess this could be done with del.icio.us, but it rather feels clumsy - it feels like there should not need to be an intermediary between my comments elsewhere and my blog?!)

WordPress Plugin Request: referrer to trackback

Published by dekay on June 13, 2005 in ideas and lazyweb. 2 Comments

I am not sure if this is possible at all - but would it not be nice to have a (spam safe) way of converting incoming referrer-URLs to trackbacks/pingbacks? So you know when a blog post has been linked to on del.icio.us or so.

Make it talk to SpamKarma and ReferrerKarma, use whitelists for URLs that you would like to have added as linkbacks… something, anything?

Or maybe we can convince Joshua to have del.icio.us post a pingback including a back-link to a page that lists all users and tags the page has been filed under.

And while we are at it: is there such a thing as a trackback/pingback to just the blog and not an individual entry?

Software Request: mp3-Tagger à la del.icio.us

Published by dekay on June 11, 2005 in lazyweb and technology. 0 Comments

As I have written previously I would love to have some way of tagging functionality in iTunes.

Right now my setting looks a bit like this:

  • I use the “Grouping” field for my tags. The tags I am currently using are things like “slow fox” or “rumba” as I am currently cataloging my collection of ballroom dance music. But I will be using tags like “electro” or “typical latino” or whatever to actually describe the styles of the songs - just to get much better and faster search functionality when I really need to find some music that is similar, e.g. when I am preparing music to play at a dancesport competition.
  • There are some cool apple scripts out that allow adding and deleting single tags from the fields “grouping” or “comments”. The scripts I use are really useful, but far from really what I want (see below). Nevertheless - they are pretty close in functionality and the only thing that is out there (yet.)

What I really would like:

  • A posting interface like the experimental posting popup from del.icio.us. The features I want are:
    • simple tag creation. just type the tag into some form field and it is created
    • re-use of old tags. show a list of tags that I have used before, and make them clickable!
    • make the selected tags stand out from the list so I can de-select them again!
  • Some additional features for the interface:
    • Give me the choice to group tags. e.g. “Dance” (would group Waltz, Cha-cha, Salsa). This way I can easily select tags that are sorted in categories.
    • Give me the choice to rename tags easily.
  • Some other stuff I would love to do with these tags:
    • playlist creation based on tags - easy, fast and useful - a “there is no step 3″-approach.
    • find similarities based on tags, make music recommendations, hey, make shuffle take into account music similarity and/or diversity! (How about a setting that goes like: shuffle my music, make 5 songs similar then completely switch to a different style and do another 5 songs!)