3 Features Missing From Evernote

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1) Smart Merging. When processing notes in Evernote, two notes about the same thing often show up. While you can merge them in certain views, it could be made much more functionally intuitive and easier, perhaps by dragging one note on top of another, using a contextual menu, or activating the feature before selecting two or more notes to merge.

2) Contacts. Of course you can keep contacts as notes tagged with “contact,” but there should be a better way. Rather than create an entirely independent system for contacts, just enable contacts that sync with GMail/Android/Yahoo/iPhone contacts.

3) Share from Web Clipper. The Web Clipper is great and allows you to clip portions of blog posts and articles to Evernote, but what if you would rather immediately share that with a contact? With #2 in place, the Web Clipper offers the option to send the clipped portion to one of your contacts, either as a link via SMS, or as an email, or even directly to their Evernote inbox for trusted contacts. (!)

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Client: Evernote Corporation.

The VIP Music Listening Experience

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cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by fluffisch

These days, I have no idea what the actual name of the song is for half the songs I listen to on my phone. They just play in a continuous stream through my earpods. I suppose this is no worse than when I had a CD player and only knew the track number of the song.

So, imagine listening to an album that is being DJ’d by the artist himself. So, as the first track ends on that Bob Dylan album, you hear Bob mention the title of the track, maybe one or two interesting tidbits about it or the upcoming song, and you continue on with the album this way.

In the case with a deceased artist, you could have different people do the same thing, e.g., producers, family, friends, other influential musicians in the same genre. With a little imagination, you can see complementary and alternate versions of the same idea.

The value here is twofold. First, your listening experience is enhanced. You know not only the titles of the songs, but also a little bit more about the whole album, and often from the band themselves.

Secondly, this service could be cloud-based, such that these snippets are served to your device as needed, which would allow them to be a value add for a distribution service like iTunes or Spotify, and should encourage people to acquire their music honestly.

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Client: Apple, Spotify, Google, Amazon, RIAA

The Browser As App Interface


cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Jason A. Samfield

When you visit a website, the browser should customize itself to the site you are visiting—becoming an extension of the site itself.

For example, while on Tumblr, you might see three additional icons to the right of the Chrome address bar: one for creating a new post, one for inbox messages, and one for account settings or to logout. Now, these icons already exist within the page, but the idea here is to allow a site to skin the browser to free up space within the browser window itself.

A set of icon links beside the address bar seems to be the easiest iteration to begin with, but these could evolve into actions. For example, these could be a set of filters that process a photo in the main window, or buttons related to commercial transactions on the page.

Perhaps the user can toggle between browser mode and the app interface mode.

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Choose Your Own Texting Adventure


cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Thomas Hawk

Your smartphone gets a bit smarter.

When you receive a text message, your phone comprehends it—and here’s where it gets interesting—attempts to generate a reply for you. In the beginning, it is only able to recognize simple YES or NO questions and give you the option of replying either way, with some styling based on how you replied to other YES or NO questions, e.g., “Sure!” or “Nope.”

After a while, however, the phone will be able to construct simple replies based on how you’ve responded to similar texts in the past, taking into account the time of day, who you are responding to, and various other factors.

Of course, it always gives you the option to click a button, bypass the generated response, and compose one of your own. Sometimes, it might give you up to three options to choose from.

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PS: I realize the title of this post suggests another idea, viz, actually making a choose your own adventure that can be played via short text messages and simple alphanumerical replies. You could do that, but you would probably be better off making that an app.

An App For Making Sense Of Terms & Conditions


cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by Jason Michael

I’ve written previously about how to make a website or service’s terms and conditions (or Terms of Service, or EULA) not only more digestible, but also more enforceable. I don’t believe most Terms are fully enforceable if they create a significant burden to the user to process. I don’t believe they should be enforceable unless they are straightforward and clear, and can be digested in less than two minutes.

With that in mind, there is an opportunity for a group of brave individuals to distill these lengthy agreements from various sites and services and offer the abbreviated version to people via a website, app, or browser extension. This seems like a good crowdsourcing effort.

For example, if I’m getting ready to purchase a ticket from American Airlines, I have to agree to one of the longest T&C in existence. (It’s possible that if you stretched it out from end to end, it would be longer than the flight you would be taking.) So, when you found yourself faced with these terms, you would click a little bookmarklet in you browser (or launch the app or visit the site, &c.), and you would be presented with a much shorter version of the terms and conditions.

This clearer version would get rid of all the superfluous legal jargon about severability, indemnification, and jurisdiction, and would instead focus on a few simple things: what information is being shared and how it will be treated, what both parties will do and will be prevented from doing, and any other part deemed noteworthy or relevant to the end user, e.g., “by using the iTunes service, you hereby agree to name your first-born child Siri.”

In short, the app would boil it down to what you wanted and needed to know about the agreement you were entering into, and it would limit it to what you could reasonably digest in a minute or two. It might even give you the option to leave feedback to the site or service provider in question, taking them to task for any overreaching.

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[11 Sept 2012: Here’s a move in this direction]

URL Shortening With Readable Words


cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Steve took it

Remember when tinyurl.com thought that it was itself a tiny URL—before sites like t.co showed them just how tiny a URL really can be?

Anyhow, all of these bit.ly styled URL shortening services seem to use a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters and numerals to create a string of characters that follow the main address of the website.

Given that sources from the Internet are increasingly being referenced in print (e.g., research papers, magazines, newspapers, and even books,) I think it would be great to offer a URL shortening service that used small words as its unique identifiers instead of letters and numbers.

For example, instead of sample.me/xU68uwWe, you would have sample.me/cellar-door or sample.me/box.potato, &c. Basically, the URL generating program would make combinations of small words having less than six or so letters and separating them by a hyphen or period.

There have to be millions of combinations that are possible with the words that would qualify, especially if you added the plural form of nouns and the participle forms of verbs, &c. It would make referencing the material much easier, even if the URL wasn’t as short as a typical shortening service, it would still be much better than the alternative, e.g., http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45583480/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/

But this idea has a limited shelf life. After all, one day soon, newspapers, magazines, books, and research papers will be digital by default and read on devices that are always connected to the Cloud, which is the shiny new word for the Internet.

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PS: Can we be done with http:// at the beginning of what is clearly or even likley a website address? Just like we all know www is the default, so too do we know http:// comes before it all, unless otherwise specified. Thank you for your cooporation.

Quora Meets Twitter?


cc licensed flickr photo shared by dkscully

I think it would be a simple matter to mark Twitter questions, that is, questions being directed to anyone and everyone, with the hashtag #?so people who would like to know what people are asking would be able to do so easily and respond to them. (We could just look for tweets ending in a question mark, but some would be rhetorical, and others would not be intended for exposure to the “hive.”)

It seems like an easy enough task to make a web page that would cull these hashtagged questions from Twitter and compilied them in one place in real time, as opposed to using Twitter’s limited search. As a matter of fact, I’ll suggest this to my Twitter developer friends, and I’ll update this post if and when they create something like this.

If it proves popular, maybe we’ll put onead on it, so as to pay for whatever hosting (or API calls) would be required.

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