Buhjillions

I was thinking about another post I’ve wanted to write about switching from a paper planner (diary for the Brits) to an electronic one. One of the few interactions in which paper calendars tend to come out ahead of electronic calendars is entering an appointment. Mobile devices just don’t have text entry interfaces that can keep up with ye olde pencil (yes, that includes you, iPhone). However, when I’m sitting in front of my desktop, I enter events into Outlook—where the interaction is just as fast as the paper planner (click the day and time, start typing). My schedule lives in the cloud somewhere and is synced to my computers (home, work, laptop) as well, but it’s the iPhone that I associate with the physical object that is “my planner.” It’s the thing I carry with me, just like I did my paper planner back in the day. The iPhone is sitting in my pocket when I’m entering appointments into Outlook, and in this sense, it’s as if my desktop computer is acting as an interface extension to my iPhone. I use the comparatively rich desktop interface to modify information on my iPhone—modifications that I’m perfectly capable of making with the iPhone’s interface, but which are simply accomplished easier with the mouse, keyboard, and full-sized display of my computer.

This got me thinking that there are plenty of other interactions I have with my mobile device which would be much easier on my computer, like sending a text message or choosing a ring-tone. I spend a good deal of time every day in front of a computer with my mobile sitting in my pocket. What if whenever I was parked in front of the computer, my mobile used a wireless link (like Bluetooth) to forward interaction tasks to my desktop. I could send and receive text messages from a small ‘chat’-style application, giving my thumbs a break. I could highlight a phone number, maybe one I found online or one from my contacts list, and issue a command to have my phone dial it. By the time I fished it out of my pocket I’d be talking to the person I called.

No, this isn’t a replacement for a good phone interface. There’s still many hours each day that I don’t have a computer around, and good interface design makes a mobile device a joy to use rather than a pain. However, there are limitations to how good you can make the interaction and still expect me to hold the thing up to my ear or slip it into my pant- (trouser-) pockets. If I’m already focused on the computer, put as much the phone interface there as possible. It would allow me to integrate my mobile even more closely into my normal workflow, and prevent me from having to dig it out and put it back, making it much less of an interruption when I do use it at my desk.

Anyone heard of any software out there already that allows you to do this kind of thing (besides the example I mentioned with the calendar)?

I’m a student at the University of Oxford, and as is standard practice, they provide a email system for staff and students. It’s called Herald, and I assume it’s a home-grown email server that has evolved from code written in the 1980s.

It’s a piece of crap.

I kid, I kid! Admittedly, that’s probably dropping a little too much hate on its poor aged lines of God-knows-what language. It has basic features and gets the job done… most of the time.

But the internet means so much more to so many more people these days, and Herald isn’t equipped to let people make the most of it. Take webmail, for example: ugly, testy, difficult—these are words which spring to my mind when I think of Herald webmail.  You’re stuck sending and receiving in plaintext, and the interface is offensively bad.  It was never supposed to be this way—Herald was designed to be used via your email client of choice, a hulking server hiding in the shadow of a more carefully crafted interface.  But since the early days of Hotmail, Yahoo! mail, Netscape and the rest, webmail has been a primary avenue of accessing email.  Some people prefer it that way, and its easy to see why: one interface to learn which can be used on any computer with an internet connection and a browser, and no obnoxious setup steps (IMAP or POP3? SMT-what? SSL-port-who?).  And since gmail came on the scene a few years back, there’s simply no reason to believe that webmail can’t be a pleasant experience.  Something is deeply wrong when free webmail services outclass what’s provided to you by the people you pay £10,000 a year.

But still, armies of my classmates here at Oxford use Herald webmail as their primary email.  They hate it, even if they don’t realize it.  I know this because it shows.  They use Facebook to send messages to one another.  That’s right, Facebook.  Facebook, with it’s terrible message editor, iron-fisted threading, and walled-garden take on communication.

But I’ve just been informed of a project in the works at Oxford’s computing services to change all that, and finally move beyond email and into the realm of internet collaboration.  These services have existed for some time now, and what Oxford is proposing isn’t anything groundbreaking—but they’re a hell of a welcome (if overdue) change.

I’ll blog more about them soon.