At Giant supermarkets, you can use these portable scanners to do a pre-checkout of sorts. Fun!

You know, I think it’s time that the gadgets in our lives get extremely customizable.  Why is it that I can’t set my lights to turn off at a certain time or the toaster to start toasting just minutes before I get downstairs?  Why can’t I set my computer to turn itself off after that program is downloaded?  Seriously, with all the cool things that our electronics can do these days, I’m surprised that I can’t control them beyond the simple power button.  In fact, I think everything should not only be programmable to do what you want when you want, there should be an app that allows you to control it while away (like those apps for home security systems).

Imagine this: you start your day when your alarm goes off at a given time.  You like to snooze, so you sleep in a little more, but when the alarm goes off the next time, the lights have been set to turn on.  Now it’s bright in the room and you’re awake.  You get up and wash up as the toaster downstairs starts heating up the bagel slices you put in there last night.  The hot water dispenser doles out one cup’s worth of water, which brews the bag of tea you had waiting in a mug.  By the time you get downstairs, your breakfast is ready for consumption!  After scarfing down the bagel and sipping on your tea, you head out for work.  At the end of the day, you’re heading back and decide to use your phone app to have your water heater dispense another cup of hot water so you can get home to a warm cup ready for drinking.  You get on your personal computer and set it to turn off once all the files you’re uploading are done.  As you’re winding down for the night, you fall asleep in bed before you even realize it, but that’s ok because your lights turn off for you at midnight anyway.

How awesome would that be?  I don’t want my devices to be smart necessarily, but I want to be able to control them in such a way that they appear “smart” in a sense.  I really think we should be able to set things to turn off or on at a certain time or with some specified trigger.  Things would be so much more efficient that way!  It’s not like the technology isn’t out there already.  We have timers controlling things like when the sprinklers go off, so why not apply that towards any other technology we use?  I’m really looking forward to the day I can do that.

Lately I’ve decided that when I get my next phone, it will be white.  It’s not just an aesthetic thing though the brightness of white is kind of nice.  It’s actually much more practical: you don’t see fingerprints, smudge marks, or greasiness on white quite as obviously as you do on black.  The more I use my phone, the more convinced I am of the benefits of a white device.  I guess part of the problem is that I use quite a bit of lotion and the smooth screen of the phone gets covered in a layer of it.  After a couple months of use, no amount of wiping, buffing, or cleansing seems to work for very long.  I even have a microfiber towel handy at my desk to clean off the screen periodically.

My iPad is white and I if it weren’t for the screen turning black when it’s off, I’d probably notice the smudges only once every ten uses instead of once every use.  I know a lot of people use screen protectors for this very purpose, but I like how the screen feels with nothing on it to alter it.  Unfortunately that also means that I have to clean the thing every time I use it.  I think it’ll also be a nice change from all the black devices out there.  It’s nice to have a bright spot among all the dark.  I wonder if Apple will ever go back to trying to offer their products in a range of colors.  I think that could be quite nice too!  I’d probably be the odd one choosing orange to tout around, just because it is so cheery and eye-catching.  In the mean time I’ll just have to stick with white.

I was at the mall today and walked by the Apple Store to find a familiar sight: people lining up! I first encountered this when I stood in line for their grand opening. Now people are doing it for the new iPhone 4S. There’s less cheering, but you get the idea…

Inside the very new, cavernous store:

I was totally nerding out today, what with the new iOS 5 coming out.  Just after 10 AM PST (as many predicted, since it seems to be Apple’s favorite time), the new software was released and I immediately began to download it for my phone.  I kept hitting a 3200 error as they pinged Apple’s servers only to get no response, or perhaps a failure response.  Apparently too many people were attempting the same and a lot were getting rejected due to the high volume.  I tried 4 or 5 times before I decided to switch over to my iPad and try to get that one updated.  Once again, I ran into the same error and had to try a half dozen times before giving up.  This time, I switched back to my phone and 2 or 3 tries later, it looked like it was finally going to work!  I lost track of how many times I actually attempted to install iOS 5, but about 6 hours later it finally worked.

By 5 PM, my phone had some exciting new features that I eagerly began to test.  Meanwhile, it was time for my iPad to take its turn again, and this time it seemed that things had cooled down enough that I got through just fine.  I think it was probably because the most eager people had already installed it and maybe partially due to the end of the work day, with people driving home, or to dinner, or otherwise occupied away from their computers.  Good news for me!  I was afraid I might not be able to get it all set up until late into the night or even later in the week.  It hasn’t been that long, but I’ve already started up a list of requests.

On Reminders, I love the ability to geotarget so I am reminded when I leave or arrive at a place, but I want to be able to control what that means.  Maybe I want to be reminded when I’m within a fraction of a mile, or maybe I want to be reminded if I’m in the vicinity, say at a 5 mile radius.  I also want to be able to choose locations based things other than my current location or an entry in my address book – what about a listing on Yelp, or even just pointing my finger at a location on a map?  I had to go through and add all these businesses to my contact list so I could set a reminder when I go there.  Not a very efficient way to handle things.  The one other function I’d really like is the ability to choose multiple locations.  For example, right now I want to get some more tea from Teavana.  I don’t care which one and I don’t know which one I will be close to in the near future, so I’d like to add all of them (or the most likely ones at least) to my location reminder.

In the Notifications dropdown, I want to be able to choose what apps to include.  I have no interest in a stock ticker and I’d rather that not take up space on my list.*  And why in the world does the iPad not come with a weather app?  Just because I don’t have 3G doesn’t mean I don’t want to check the weather based on my wifi location!  That would be useful to have in the notification bar just like on the phone.

On the iPad, I like the idea of undocking the keyboard, but why does it have to get stuck in the middle of the screen?  I want to be able to slide it up and down as I please.  I also don’t get why when you split the keyboard in half, it has to get so small.  Once again, I want full control here, choosing how far to drag them apart, which would determine the size of the keys.  When it automatically shrinks down to iPhone keyboard size, it’s just too small.  Since you can quickly take a picture with your phone now, why didn’t they implement the same for the iPad?  I want to be able to quickly take a shot with that device as well!

As for things that are broken, I noticed were that you can break into the phone past the lock code if you use the new quick launch camera feature and try to look at photos.  Definitely a security breach to be fixed ASAP.  Another thing is the inability to put Newsstand in a folder.  I have no need for it, so I just want to tuck it away somewhere.  So far I haven’t been able to use tabbed browsing on my phone, which I’m pretty sure is supposed to be offered.

Of course mostly it’s all good though.  I love the reminders, especially with geotargeting.  I like the new look of the notifications and the less intrusive nature.  The Notification bar is very handy!  The swiping between open apps in the iPad is fast and fantastically convenient.  I’ve wanted to be able to take pictures faster and with a physical button to push.  Finally being able to format my emails a bit is nice.

I’m sure I’ll learn a lot more as I use it more and go through the checklist of features to make sure I know them all.  I’ll definitely think of further suggestions/ideas – too bad I don’t know who would listen!  Sometimes I wish it was easier to give feedback and actually be paid attention to.  Hopefully the people at Apple will be trying to do some of the things I did and stumble upon the same issues…  Until then, I will enjoy what I can use.  :)

*As it turns out, I found that you can choose which apps to display in the Notification settings.

Well, today Apple finally revealed the upcoming iPhone release, which proved to be just an upgrade of the current iPhone 4.  Ok, maybe just is a little harsh.  Granted, they did announce some cool stuff, but the only thing that I was interested in was the new Siri app that the iPhone 4S has.  It’s basically a built-in personal assistant/concierge to help you in your day-to-day life, whether it’s finding a new restaurant or answering text messages hands-free.  The cool thing is that it seems to be really good at voice recognition and understands what you are saying far better than any other application I’ve seen.  Not only that, it knows more about the meaning of what you’re saying so you can use conversational language like you would with a person.  You don’t have to memorize a list of simple commands that it can understand (like most other similar technology) – just talk and it will understand what you’re asking for.

What I’m looking forward to even more than that is the new iOS 5 and iCloud.  A lot of the updates with those two things make life a whole lot easier and the technology of iPhones, iPods, iPads, and Macs even more seamless.  I’ve been waiting a long time to be able to take a picture quickly and easily with my phone.  I always said that they should make one or more of the external buttons function as the shutter button when running the camera app.  It’s really hard to tap an icon on the screen to get a shot when you only have one hand.  They’re finally allowing that, with the volume up button acting as the shutter clicker.  Additionally, notifications and reminders are key organizational tools that I have other apps for, but will be so much better when it all easily integrates with the rest of the suite of tools in my device.  Now I can set these things and have them added to my calendar or pull from my contacts list.

I know that cloud computing is the new era, so I’m really glad to have iCloud coming soon.  It will be so nice to have all photos, contacts, and calendar updates automatically synced across devices and backed up on the cloud.  As it stands you have to set up syncs manually, which is a bit of a hassle.  I just hope that the introduction of iCloud also means my game progress will be saved across devices.  Right now when I play a game on one, it doesn’t update on the other, so I end up only playing certain games on one device, then having to switch to another device for a different game.  As of yet it doesn’t look like this is possible, but it’s got to be on the horizon.

I definitely would not consider upgrading my iPhone 4 to the 4S, but I’m looking forward to what iPhone 5 will bring.

Panda and I went to The Tech museum in San Jose, which had some cool interactive exhibits, like this one that took our picture, drew it out, carefully placed the pen back, and suctioned the paper over to the slot so we could take it with us.

My greatest pet peeve about technology is that it often doesn’t take change well.  I wish it was easy to put multiple accounts together, and to weed out any duplicates that occur in the process.  Take contact lists, for example.  Why is it that when I try to sync my Google contacts with my phone, I end up getting a whole lot of the same entries, instead of a clean list?  I understand if they need to ask me about the merge if different versions of the contacts contain different information (such as one only has email and the other only has phone number, or the listed contact information doesn’t match).  However, it’s just not that easy and I’ve had to manually go through and sort through the listings to correct them, which is quite tedious.

Another thing that totally baffled me recently is Apple IDs.  They don’t always make it clear when you are making a new one, so I somehow ended up with two even though I meant to change my primary email address for my account.  I did some research and they make it very clear that they do not merge accounts, so I had to figure out which account to keep as my main one.  Why it is that they can’t combine your accounts with a data migration is beyond me.  Perhaps I don’t understand enough of the coding, but nevertheless, this is a common issue that people have and I feel that it’s worth any trouble to create a good system to do so.

I also don’t see why user IDs can’t be easily updated as we wish, so we can change our minds as often as we want.  After all, we go through life changes all the time, sometimes wanting a fun screen name, sometimes wanting a professional one, and sometimes just wanting one other than what we have.  Why create an entire account just because of that?  It would make so much more sense to keep all the information that has been associated with an account and just change the username you log in with or share with others.

It’s amazing that it has been so long and still these improvements that would allow us so much more control over our accounts are not something we can expect from any form of technology we choose to use.  The pains of trying to get around it or fix it almost don’t even make it worth it either.  Whatever happened to technology being able to make your life easier?  It seems to be causing me a whole lot of (time-consuming) problems instead!

They started off normally, but then this happened…