Nothing’s perfect in this world and jQuery is not the exception to prove the rule. Sometimes the replaceWith() function doesn’t seem to work, no matter what you do. It looks like the function does nothing, and that’s a problem. But don’t bother; this will do the trick:
Have you ever had an imaginary friend? Well maybe not (I haven’t), but for once let’s imagine that you do have one. Picture a cloudy-like, fuzzy-shaped form with unlimited knowledge and memory, always willing to answer any question your soul could possibly want to ask (expect maybe for the Ultimate Question which has already been already been answered anyway).
Specifically, your imaginary friend’s characteristics could include (but not be limited to) the following:
It’s your best friend.
It’s always available to you, wherever you are.
It has instant access to all the facts of the world.
It has a photographic memory of everything you’ve seen and know.
It can tailor answers to you based on your preferences, your existing knowledge and the best available information.
When a question is vague, it could ask for clarification.
It would present the answers in whatever setting or media worked best.
Now, that sounds nice! Our imaginary friend (which we’ll lovingly call “Cloudie” for the sake of our paradigm) would be the perfect companion. Omnipresent and omnipotent, it would have a (pretty much) thorough knowledge of everything regarding you, as well as the whole world, thus being able to answer any of your questions. The perfect friend, companion and tool.
Before you start imagining how privileged you would be with such a best friend, I am sorry to spoil this by informing you that Cloudie would not be exclusive to you - it would have other friends of its own as well. And it would be best friend to every one of them, not only you. Oh, and picture that there would be millions of them (thus explaining how Cloudie could possibly have access to all the facts of the world).
So how would you feel about that? I imagine I would be terrified , knowing that someone had that much information about me and about every person in the world as well. First of all, what if Cloudie, my best friend, disclosed some of my private information to a third party? Sure, it says it would never do that, but how do I know? Sometimes even your best friend can’t be trusted; and also , what could such a powerful all-knowing being evolve to, if it decided to be malevolent? It’s terrifying, really.
Back to reality
Frightening as it may sound, our fictional friend already exists and its name is Google. It’s not yet capable of doing all the nice things I’ve mentioned, but it’s what it yearns to become - and this is not my point of view, but rather the definition of the ideal search engine according to Marissa Mayer, the Vice President of Search Product and User Experience at Google, as seen in this TechCrunch article. So before you begin to question my conspiracy/totalitarian/big-brotherish fears, you can check out for yourself that it’s all true.
But that’s not why I decided to write this article, really. It’s another thing that made me write about Google - their newest project, coded Project 10100.
We don’t have the answers, but we believe that you do. And we want them.
Basically, project 10100 aims to make the world a better place, by doing something that would help 10100 people all around the globe (that’s orders of magnitude greater than the population of the Earth). But it turns out that the all-knowing search engine giant doesn’t have the answer to every question; quoting their blog:
But what would help, and what would be most helpful? We don’t believe we have the answers, but we do believe the answers are out there.
So since they don’t have the answers, they ask us, ordinary people, to provide them . For this reason they’ve made a submission form which you can use to submit your idea for helping a lot of people and making the world a better place. Google experts will review the submitted ideas and the best 100 of them will be announced for the public to pick the semi-finalists, then “an advisory board will choose up to five final ideas for funding and implementation”, according to the project’s webpage.
That’s right, the company has committed $10 million to fund the top-5 ideas. They will own your idea, implement it and make the world a better place. Oh, and they’ll probably make tons of money by integrating their ads in the final product (not to mention the information gathering by the product itself).
So what do you get for giving Google your best idea on how to make this world a better place? Nothing, except for “fame”. If you’re the kind of person who would fancy your name being announced in the top 5 ideas that will change the world and that will make you live happily ever after, go ahead and submit your idea before the deadline expires on October the 20th, 2008.
If you’re not that kind of person, and would imagine that Google was searching for the brightest minds to incorporate with them, to fund them and help them create a product that will change the world for the best, you’re out of luck. Sorry, you still need to seek funding.
This morning I stumbled upon yet another expense tracker start-up, named ExpenseTracker (!), that tries to differentiate by letting users enter expenses through voice, by calling a number and entering the expense’s details. Other features are advertised as well, such as spending plans tailored by economy experts etc, but the main theme is entering data through voice.
Visiting their site, the first impression you get is that you hit a telemarketing channel. A well-suited man (whose blonde hair looks far from natural) starts to tell you that usually all the budget trackers “rely on you going home [...] and spending hours entering receipts into the right categories [...]. Come on, let’s be real; this is not gonna happen”. The ad goes on even showing a woman calling through her mobile and entering an expense.
First of all, the aesthetics of the website and the telemarketing attitude (check out their moto “You’ll Find Money, Guaranteed!“) won’t convince me that I should trust these people with my financial details. Second, there’s yet another point that makes this whole calling-my-wallet theme pointless: I would rather enter that data into an app running on my mobile phone. There are a few (quite feature-limited) expense tracker apps for the iPhone which can come in handy, and I think it’s far easier to tap a couple of buttons to quickly record your expense, than calling a speech recognition system, not to mention a lot faster.
I am not aware of any such apps for other mobile platforms but I bet we’ll see plenty of them since more and more mobile platforms are about to introduce their own version of Apple’s App Store. Backed up with a powerful web app to sync data with, the stack would be quite useful. But I haven’t seen yet one expense tracking web app that actually displays any insightful realization of my expenses other than plain graphs. If you know any, let me know in the comments.
Meanwhile, other start-ups are trying to assist users in other ways, like shoeboxed, for example that wants you to mail them (snail mail, not e-mail) all your receipts so they scan them and categorize them for you. Thanks, but I’d rather keep my receipts in my office. Unless there’s an app on my phone that snaps a photo of my receipts, auto-magically recognizes the data as well as the kind of expense and records it for me, computes trends and estimates and displays valuable information about my spending and saving habits - until then I’ll stick to the old model of hand-entering the details.
Recently, I’ve been arguing with a trio of ambitious entrepreneurs whether a touch interface is coming to Apple products and how this could possibly affect iPhone app development. My point was that, since Apple has already filed a patent for a touch-screen mac and had shown strong interest on multi-touch user interfaces (see iPhone), it won’t be long until we see new touch-screen Macs.
Today, circulating the news is a video demonstrating Mac OS X Leopard running on a Gigabyte M912X (video follows), a small PC laptop with a touch-screen. The video is hosted on YouTube and has already been viewed more than 12k times since it was uploaded two days ago. Reading the comments, one can see that many people would like to do the same thing with their tablet PCs, which strengthens the idea that a touch-screen Mac (or a tablet Mac) would be quite popular.
If Apple officially produces touch-screen Macs, then I can safely bet that the UI (User Interface) would be enhanced to support multi-touch gestures etc, as well as other features that were missing in the OS since it was hard to implement without a touch interface. Combining this with the recent incidents of Apple rejecting iPhone apps for duplicating built-in functionality, my point was that building an iPhone app with features resembling those of a future Mac OS release supporting touch, could possibly be rejected - if Apple has already implemented such features in the OS. And since Apple is a company that knows well how to keep secrets (see the move to Intel processors) it wouldn’t be a surprise if we suddenly see Jobs demonstrating a tablet Mac on stage, anytime soon.
