iPhone Gestures

My wife and I have an iPhone. My biggest, and really only, complaint is about how it works as an iPod.

When she is driving and I'm in charge of the music, she says "Next" a lot. You have to press the Home button, then slide to unlock, then press the small Next button all to go to the next song.
(EDIT: As comments noted; also doing double-click the Home button and look to see the Next on the screen too. But still, you've got to look at the screen.)


Hopefully somebody at Apple is listening...add Locked iPhone Gestures.

Let me press the Home button, then "draw" commands with my finger on the "locked" screen. Simple shapes to tell it go to the next song or other commands. If it was me, I'd do a > shape like the button in the UI for next. Two fingers sliding down to do II that would pause. < to go back. I'm sure you could think of more...and it would be awesome.


And while you're at it, when playing an audiobook, the little slider to move back and forth in the book is way too sensative. For a 5 minute song it's OK, but a 2 hour book jumps minutes at a time. Again, you add Gestures. The good old "circling finger" as if I was using an old style iPod would be perfect to scroll forward and backward in the track.

Not what I expected

After spending a lifetime watching cartoons and movies, this is not what I expected to see happen after a fire hydrant was hit by a car.

Cool thing for my Resume

About 2 years ago now, when I was first adding the BitTorrent support to GetRight, I wrote a proposal for how others could do the same combining of HTTP/FTP downloads into a BitTorrent download that I was adding into GetRight.


It's been edited and updated a few times, the original is here:
http://getright.com/seedtorrent.html



As I've been working on other things and not paying attention, it's become a quite accepted standard for BitTorrent clients. All the main ones, including the BitTorrent.com client itself, now do it. Pretty awesome!


I've just written it up in the format for the new "BitTorrent Enhancement Proposals".



I get to add to my resume: "Invented the WebSeed mechanism that has become part of the BitTorrent protocol standards." (Draft in the proposals right now...but a lot of clients have done it.)
http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0019.html

Thoughts on Tech News...MS vs Yahoo

So when Microsoft made its huge bid for Yahoo, was it thinking:

If they take it, great.

If they don't, it will so mess Yahoo up, they'll be sidetracked for months or years and we can overtake them that way. People are starting to sue Yahoo for not accepting. It's created a huge amount of uncertainty for all Yahoo's employees. Hmm.