I've been looking at David Allen's Getting Things Done method for controlling workload without stress. It's pretty funny. In moving through the book I re-organized my task lists in Outlook into "actionable" things, instead of nebulous, things like "change the world" etc etc.

I managed to hit a button and turn on a view of all my completed tasks from the past few years, and never before realized how humorous these things can be. Among the highlights are "Come up with a solution for ....'s project cos he's too *#?/**# lame to do it himself", and "Where the hell did my year go?" - a great description for a task if ever there was one.

12:37:02 PM    

There's a nice piece over on Engadget about Microsoft's plans to support "auxilliary displays" in Longhorn. This is a pretty cool deal. The idea is that you would have a separate LCD display, perhaps mounted in the back of the screen of a notebook, that could be used to show summary information. That's cool. Imagine that on a convertible tablet - you'd have the screen closed when suddenly the small aux display would light up with a beep to let you know that you're supposed to be in a meeting. All those lame Alarm Clock apps I would write when travelling could use this display as my bedside hotel alarm clock.

Thinking out of the box a little, why hasn't someone come up with a bluetooth paired watch that can do these things though. It would be so cool if my PC could notify my Watch to remind me that I have a meeting about now, or that my favourite show is about to happen on TV. There's something to think about with SPOT.

9:08:59 AM    

In England at least Appletize is the name of a soft drink. I think the word should be adopted beyond that though to illustrate what Apple do with simple product ideas.

Over at Scoble's blog (that man is just a blogging machine isn't he - every morning I grab my feeds before the train journey and regularly get over a hundred new entries courtesy of his main and link blogs), Robert highlights a story he read about Apple's internal generosity. It seems that when the iPod Shuffle was released (the new solid state, display-less iPod), the management at Apple generously decided to give every member of staff one for free. How cool is that?

Well, very cool, but really not that surprising. The iPod Shuffle is at the end of the day a USB Keychain "AppleTized", and plenty of companies have given their staff USB Keychains in the past. In the case of Apple though, they took a USB Keychain and said "What can we do to make this really droolworthy? How can we add value to something so ordinary". They Appletized it!

 That I think is Apple's greatest strength today. Their operating system is pretty darn good, but it's really just Unix. Their hardware is nice too, but their Powerbooks are just small notebooks, and their desktops are just dual processor towers. The thing that makes them all stand out is that they are AppleTized. MacOS X is the result of someone looking at Unix and going "How can we make this REALLY cool?". The Powerbook is the result of someone looking at a notebook and thinking "I wonder how we can make this just so much less ordinary".

Microsoft dominate the software world, for better or worse. Thinking about their products though, the user interfaces in particular are just so "functional". Wouldn't it be great if Microsoft upon enteirng the Longhorn era got guys in to "Appletize" their product line. Can you imagine the results of that? Tablet PC in particular would just be orgasmic in it's lushness.

Perhaps this is something we should all do. The next time you come up with that great new product idea, just after you've wailed on MindManager on your Tablet PC to get the feature list down, sit back and think "What would Steve Jobs do with this idea? How can I Appletize it?"

Let's go back to the Tablet PC for a minute and do just that. I think Steve would say, with copious amounts of gesticulation, expletives, and very personal insults (bless him) that first the user interface is brain damaged. There are too many on screen buttons to click, too many options to choose from in most applications. It should be like Paper, not an application pretending to be Paper. You should turn pages with a wave of the pen, use context sensitive overlays for pen selection settings. Adding new tabs to a journal like application should be like tearing off a new tab and sticking it in a journal in real life - we need a visual metaphor for that. Also, make it Instant-On, just like a pad of paper. The Tablet should just fire up with PDA like speed when you grab it.  Also, make it learn. If someone writes something, converts it to Ink and we get it wrong, then we should learn from that and not make the same mistake twice. People double underline stuff with a pen that's really important, so support that in the app - make the journal-like app highlight whatever gets double underlined, or index it for searching.

What about the machine itself? Well that's obvious. If you want to Appletize hardware you need just one of two things; white clearcoat, or aluminium.

9:08:54 AM