It is never too late...

Today I choose to be positive!

Finally they installed power plugs in Swiss trains as you can see in the picture. It's certainly useful but it comes when now laptop batteries have extended time life. It would have been more useful a few years ago when batteries lasted only 1-2 hours.

Next I expect to have Internet connectivity when nearly everybody will have their mobile Internet plan on mobile devices.

One lesson learned is that innovation bust be deployed in a timely fashion otherwise it becomes obsolete or useless.

Providers of public services need to understand that. If users ask for a new service or an improvement, that means that they need it NOW! They must react fast even with a suboptimal solution.

If I am really hungry, every kind of food will do the job.

Apple iOS5 location-based reminders for Just in Time/Place task assignment

RemindersApple introduced a new feature in the new iOS 5 that could open several opportunities for developers. As described by Apple here:

A better way to do to-dos.

Next time you think to yourself, “Don’t forget to...”, just pull out your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch and jot it down. Reminders lets you organise your life in to-do lists — complete with deadlines and locations. Say you need to remember to pick up milk during your next shopping trip. Since Reminders can be location based, you’ll get an alert as soon as you pull into the supermarket car park. Reminders also works with iCal, Outlook and iCloud, so changes you make update automatically on all your devices and calendars.

I have explored location-based reminders in one of my works on Kinetic User Interafaces. I instantiated this type of reminders to a shopping-list (UbiShop) scenario where a shared shopping-list is used to send reminders to people when they are located in a place where items in the list can be purchased (e.g. near a grocery store).

This not the only application of location-based reminders as it is applicable to several other situations. I called this "just-in-time/just-in-place" task assignment. You can find here a research article on this subject.

If Apple will provide API to manage location-based reminders within the OS for developers, what I have conceived can become a true reality. I am very excited about that and willing to dive into it.

You can watch below a video made by some of my students who implemented a prototype of Just-in-Time/Place reminders for the UbiShop scenario.

Hype

a real-life exponential growth!

Apple iTunes App Store glitch

As it is common for many people living in several locations, I have several iTunes accounts. It happened I purchased (well, it was free, but technically it's the same) an App from the Swiss App store which has now been removed. However, the app is available in another country's App store for which I have an account.

Now, when I am connected to this App store my iPod detects an update of the application (from a different country's App store from which it has originally purchased). When I try to update it, it asks me again the original country's App store account password, which I provide. But the result is that it bounces back to the other App store and tells me that the app is no longer available.

Currently, I don't see any workaround for this problem.

Of course, it is in general very annoying having to switch from one account to another for updating the apps (including selecting the different iTunes stores and wait that everything loads).