 |
 |
My new fiancée in our new, 25th floor home.
I’m trying to come up with some words to mark the occasion, but I’m stuck on “holy shit.”
| Tweet |
| Tweet |
This isn’t strictly a tech blog, much less a how-to blog, but I figured I owe the Internet a handy how-to for all the ones it gives me.
With Apple’s release of the latest iPhone/iPod/iPad operating system, iOS 5, came an app called Find My Friends, which does precisely what its name implies using the devices’ GPS. There are other apps that have been around a while and do this pretty well (see also: Google Latitude), but they’re beyond the scope of this post.
Click the image to download the app.
The trouble with Find My Friends is that, for security, it prompts you for your iTunes password every time you open the app. This is a deal breaker for a lot of people and creates a lot of friction in the name of security.
Here’s how to get around it:
Find My Friends allows you to forego the password if you set a passcode lock on your phone, a four-digit PIN you have to enter every time you unlock the screen. You can set a passcode in Settings > General > Passcode Lock. But this too is security friction I don’t want. So…
In the same settings module, you can tell your phone how often you want to be prompted for the passcode. By default, the phone requires it each time the screen is locked or goes to sleep. If you tap “Require Passcode” in the passcode settings, however, you can choose to only be prompted after 1 minute, 5 minutes, 15 minutes, or an hour.
Choose an hour.
Now you can use Find My Friends without being prompted for an iTunes password AND without having to enter a passcode every time you unlock your phone’s screen.
If you’re less cavalier than I am about the security of your phone’s contents in the wrong hands, consider that Find My iPhone (or iPad, or whatever), designed for tracking stolen devices, allows you to wipe the device remotely. You should have Find My iPhone activated anyway, folks. In iOS 5, it’s in Settings > iCloud > Find My iThing.
| Tweet |
They used to play this awesome hold music at my old dorm, The University Center of Chicago.
And about a million other places, it turns out, because it’s the default hold music for Cisco CallManager IVR.
I used to call extensions I knew didn’t have phones attached, just to listen to it.
| Tweet |
The video actually makes me queasy.
It’s of a game kids are playing in the city where someone points to a random stranger and another person in the group has to go punch him or her, ideally knocking the victim out, or risk being on the receiving end of the same or similar.
Pretty sick.
*I would have embedded it, but Fox News doesn’t make that easy, so you’ll have to watch it on their Website.
| Tweet |
Last week, I posted a cool video from Microsoft about concept technology for the near future. In the post, I needled Microsoft for rarely delivering technology that wows and boggles and inspires the way the stuff in the video does.
(A really smart friend of mine disagreed, and we each had our say, and that’s that.)
Then I found Bret Victor’s illuminating “Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design.”
In it, he argues today’s multitouch technology we’re all so in love with is really selling humanity short because we have these awesome things called HANDS that can do all sorts of amazing stuff, and our phones and tablets, which he calls Pictures Under Glass, don’t offer a way to interact with them the way we interact with and use everything else.
It’s a really interesting view on the issue, and well written, and cheeky, but also authoritative — Victor was a “Human Interface Inventor” at Apple for three years.
And it’s a really good challenge to the imagination. I’m not even sure how to phrase it right, but here’s a shot: what would you expect of computing devices if their interaction surfaces were tactile in a way that leverages the complex capabilities of the human body? What if your tablet responded to your touch with shifts in weight and texture?
Crazy ideas welcome.
Thanks to Woven’s David Notik for sharing Victor’s post.
| Tweet |
This Microsoft “Vision” video keeps popping up on my radar. It demonstrates great imagination, then executes it beautifully.
The irony I can’t ignore is that it was produced by a company that traditionally does neither. One time in 1985, Microsoft revolutionized the way we use computers by releasing Windows. Since then, its products have revolutionized productivity much in the way a whisk revolutionizes eggs. There’s probably a better way and this method kind of hurts my elbow, but we already bought 200,000 whisks, so keep at it. Tilt the bowl a bit. There you go.
Indeed, this is an exciting time for people and computers getting along*. But I’d hardly consider Microsoft to be a major player. True, they’ve been developing a coffee-table sized iPad for a few years now, but I don’t envision letting my kids do school projects on a piece of furniture worth more than my car.
Anyway. Cool video.
*If you were unaware of this, try Evernote, Dropbox, Google Docs, or one of those talky things from the garage guy in California.
| Tweet |
