What I'd like from my real estate agent ...

Wouldn't it be cool if I could check out which houses where on sale when I passed through a nice neighborhood? Maybe I can (but my phone does not have GPS). Oh! And on that note until recently I had a Palm with a GPS built in. Pretty cool. I was cycling in Italy up this really nasty mountain and wanted to find out how far from the top I was. All I got was a grey map with a dot on because the darn thing used the mobile coverage to download the maps (and there was no mobile coverage at that particular point). Pretty un-cool. What if the phone downloaded the maps needed for say a 20 km radius when I last checked the maps and used those if no there's coverage? Now I just use my cheap Nokia (without GPS) and Google Maps. Works for me ... :-)

PS: Blackberry sucks. Big time. I never got used to the strange operating system (what's with the two options when reading mail: "More ..." and "More All ..."? - btw. normally "..." after a menu item indicates that a separate window opens up :-)). Also I can type faster on my Nokia with spelling turned on than on the crummy keyboard on the Blackberry.

Chrome - re-visited ...

One year has passed since I downloaded Google Chrome to check it out. It's now my default browser. Can't really explain why, as most of the features (if not all) are in IE also. It just seems faster. Some of the reason is because they don't steal screen real estate at the top (or bottom) of my screen as much as IE does. And I love the ability to search directly from the adress bar (although you can also do this in IE). Interesting note on this: I tested a client app that was a Document Management System and we'd made one example using this approach (i.e a more or less blank screen and then an adress/search bar at the top. Only one of 8 users found out how it worked unprompted. The rest where stuck in the old "filing cabinet mode". Would be fun to test this approach in 2 or 3 years.

User behaviour when taking photos

Have you noticed how people now a days always hold the camera in front of their face (between 20-40 cm)? On our recent summer holiday in France a friendly person offered to take a picture of the whole family (normal photographer included), and he did exactly that. Problem is, we've got a digital SLR camera, which means that you can only view the picture on the screen on the back AFTER the photo has been captured. He never even thought of putting his eye to the finder on top of the camera. 10 years ago this would never have happend. Interesting how our habits change due to usage patterns without us even noticing.