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Tuesday, December 14, 2004
A few years ago in Kona I had an idea for putting barcodes on billboards, so that devices such as PDAs could read them and use them as web links. The idea came to me as we were driving behind a small van with some ad URL on the back - really, who is going to remember that by the time they get home? I sure won't. The idea was to create real-world hyperlinks.
Damn, I should have [patented that mofo] (there are several companies doing this now).
With that in mind, why not take the idea of [Delicious Library] to cellphones? Just about every time I go to a bookstore I wish I could pull out my Amazon wish list, just to remember what books I was looking for. And more than once I've seen something I've wanted to look up online. Why not have my phone scan the bar code or ISBN, query Amazon, add/delete things from my wish list, etc.? A good portion of the app could be subsidized just from the Amazon Affiliate revenue.
I've got way more ideas for Series 60 phone applications than I have time to write, but I'm working on porting more of the development tools to MacOS X. Nokia and Symbian have been kind of slow to do so (though they have ported to Linux x86), and Metrowerks is leaving us out in the cold. Right now you can develop MIDP applications on the Mac, but that's about it.
Nearly unrelated, I recently found the version of [Opera for my phone]. It's cool, and like most Opera apps has some features that are really compelling - it was clearly designed to be used on a phone. Newton web browsers had shortcuts for "www.", ".com", ".net", etc. so you did not have to type them out every time you wanted to go to a website. Opera is the only mobile browser I've seen so far that has this - kudos to them. Unfortunately, the Opera browser requires 2.4MB of [memory] to run, which is 300kb more than I have to spare most of the time. Unless I have just restarted the phone, I can't run Opera.
[ 12/14/2004 04:32:00 PM ] [
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