Thought: virtual iPhone for cut and paste between phone and computer

I'd like a 'virtual iphone' program on my computer that would open when I connected my iPhone. The program would emulate my iphone, including all of the data and applications on it.

The virtual and actual phones would be synched in real time. If I did anything on either my virtual iPhone or my actual iPhone, the other one would act in exactly the same way. (to get the most out of some apps you'd need some way to emulate multi-touch).

Why? So when u copied text or images in the virtual iPhone it'd appear on the windows clipboard. And items in the windows clipboard would be pastable into the virtual iPhone and thus directly into my actual iPhone.

Say I had some text in my iPhone notes app that I wanted to put into a text file I'm editing on my computer - i think this cut and paste between the virtual iPhone and the text editor would be the most convenient way of doing it.

(and it'd be even better if the phone could _wirelessly_ connect up with the computer...)

On language documentation for experienced programmers

For someone familiar with programming it's pretty easy to get going with a new language.  The new language will likely contain many familiar concepts, just perhaps done a bit differently.  There are stylistic differences between languages, but I'm talking about the basics here.

What is the most efficient way to present these programmers with what they need to know to get going with a new language?

I tend to find most documentation isn't that good for this task. What I find useful is concrete examples of the features, directly showing the syntax and the results you get for particular inputs.

Like if I already know how to do regular expressions and want to see how they're done in Python, I just want to see what a call looks like in Python and see things like what sort of value is returned if there is no match.  

So perhaps you could have documentation that was essentially a representative bunch of simple examples showing the exact inputs and exact outputs.

You'd have clusters of examples showing the different variations on a particular construct or function. Eg those showing the syntax for doing different things with regular expressions. They'd come with brief descriptions of what is being illustrated. Eg 'non-greedy matches'.

It'd be even better of you could edit the examples then and there to modify the input values and see how it effected the results.

The idea would be to have the information in a format that is concise and easy to scan, to make it as quick as possible to lookup what you want to do.  

Amon Tobin's update about forthcoming album

Amon Tobin talks about progress towards his next album. This is the first time I've heard any mention of it

as far as a new album, well I know I've been quiet lately but hopefully it will be worth it. I've been building the studio and my own new tools (software) specifically for it which in itself takes time. I have something quite particular in mind but it requires allot of learning and preparation. necessary steps for evolution if you will.. I'm more impatient than anyone though, swear I feel like a kid when I think about it. but yes will be a while yet.. in the meantime please check the new site when it's up for updates and thank you all as always for your support and curiosity in this thing I love.

idea: using 'photo sequences' in photo viewing apps

Say you've got a bunch of pics in a directory or in your iPhone photo roll and amongst those there's a set of consecutive pics that form a grouping. You might have looked at a unit to rent and taken several pictures of the place - these photos would be in a consecutive sequence, bounded at both ends by photos taken at other times and places.

A photo viewing app might be able to automatically determine such groupings. It could use the photo metadata about when and where the photos were taken, and form groups of photos where each successive photo was not taken too far away from, and not too long after the one prior to it. Perhaps some AI techniques could help out as well (though I'm a bit doubtful of any of the existing techniques being good enough to do a sufficiently useful job).

It's hard to know how well these groupings could be automated without actually trying it. Lets consider the possibility that the software could do a reasonable job.

The iPhone photo roll is just a flat sequence of photos. Each photo you take gets appended to the end of it. As people have pointed out, the iPhone tends to eschew hierarchial storage of information within folders and sub-folders, instead using flat storage like this. Storing information in a flat structure in chronological order seems a reasonable solution that meshes reasonably well with human memory. One problem with it, though is that you can end up with a huge number of items -- in this case photos -- all lumped in together.

An app that could detect the photo groupings could have ways to browse the photos in terms of them.

Perhaps each grouping would be displayed as a line of thumbnails, with the groupings shown one after the other as you go down the screen. You'd scroll down to view more of the groupings. If there were more photos in a grouping than you could fit in a line of the screen (a likely possibility) it could continue the line off to the right - requiring a horizontal scroll to see them. Or maybe it would just only show as many as would fit on the screen, and use an icon to show there were more. You could click on that to view the first unshown photo.

I think it mightn't matter so much if you only see some of the photos in each group - hopefully the ones you would see would be enough to remind you of the subjectmatter of those photos and know if any one you were after was in that group or not. And since only a single line is shown for each group, it means that you could (i'd think) be able to scroll more quickly through all of your photos.

Of course it might not be as efficient if a lot of groupings only contained a one, two or a handful of photos.

There are other possibilities for displaying based on groupings. The screen could show one grouping at a time, where you swipe to the right to see the next group. And if too many photos in the group to display at once, scroll down to see the others (like how he iPhone photo roll works).

The general idea is that using photo groupings would be a way to give a lightweight, automatic structure to the sequence of photos -- without having hierarchies, thus preserving the benefits of 'flat' layouts iPhone uses.

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notes

When viewing the photos one by one and you got to the first image in a photo group, it could do the following. Instead of viewing that first photo, it could show thumbnails for all the photos in the group. You click on one of them to jump straight to it. Of if you just scrolled across to the next photo it would _then_ show you the first photo in the group.

Alternatively, when you hit the first photo in the group it could show it, but then underneath it show a line of thumbnails for the other photos in the group (and perhaps it would do the same when you were viewing any of the other photos in the group).

Regarding the automatic determining of the groups, perhaps the software could let you manually adjust its auto-groupings. It could also let you create your own groupings and give the groupings names. I suspect though that for a device like the iPhone, this'd be getting too complicated.

A practical way to compensate musicians?

These days purchasing music is pretty much a voluntary act of charity.  The listener decides if they'll pay. 

I think a number of ppl would like to pay some amount to the artists but not the amount the music's sold for.  Which means they end up just pirating it for free.  

They might pay something if it was an  amount they were comfortable with and doing so was super low friction. 

Since they'd only pay what they're comfortable with they'd have to set the price. 

I'm not talking about how things should be in an ideal world. But trying to see what is the best that can be done in the world as it is. 

You could incorporate a new feature into music playing programs like WinAmp and iTunes. When they installed they'd ask the user if they want to make a monthly contribution amount that'd be distributed amongst the artists whose songs the person plays. The user could enter in an amount they were comfortable with - eg $5. Obviously this'd have to be connected with something like pay pal or a credit card.  

The user would of course be able to later change this amount or stop the payments all together. 

The programs can track which songs by which artists the person plays (like plugins for things like last.fm currently do - in fact the scheme I'm describing could alternatively be done via a site like that). 

It'd then divide the monthly amount appropriately between those artists. Obviously there'd need to be infrastructure to get all these paymets to them. That'd probably be the hard bit to do.

This seems pretty low friction  Once it's set up the user doesnt need to think about it or think about how the amount of music they're playing is going to cost them.  The amount they pay is known in advance and is a flat amount that's the same no matter how few or many songs they listen to in the month.
 
It could be set up so a verified display of their contribution amount could, if they wanted, be shown on their facebook profile or whatnot, which might apply a little social pressure to others to contribute.  

Making these contributions the default on music players could harness the power of defaults.

And of course there's the potential to apply such a model to other media such as movies or newspapers.

The iPhone analogue of Vim-like editing?

What'd b the iPhone/touchscreen analogue of Vim-like editing?  

The most obvious thing would b to have modes.

This might not seem that useful. After all a lot of the benefit of having modes is being able to explicitly specify positions in the text or blocks of text, such as 'the end of this sentence' or 'this paragraph', whih is less of a benefit with a touchscreen coz u can directly point at and select things.  

Still I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to b easier to specify certain text positions/ranges in a vim-like way.

Another benefit of modal editing is dealing with structure such as markup or code.  

Coz the iPhone has a virtual keyboard it could have different virtual keyboards for each mode. At least it'd be interesting to see if this made things better.
   
You could poss also use gestures (or maybe even phone movements) to specify certain commands. 

And I wonder if such an editor could help w/ coding on phone ala Y-Combinator's RFS 5: Development on Handhelds.  

Thought: iPhone 'slush pool' for making small payments practical

Just some quick notes. iPhone 'slush pool'
For small, fairly frequent payment amounts to work it needs to be low friction
No putting in ure iTunes password for each payment
The idea:
You have a 'slush pool'. A max amount put in at a time - a small amount like $5. You enter your password when u do this.
And you can use this to make small quick payments. Like paying 4 media content. 
Coz u don't enter password it's not as safe. Someone could grab your phone and buy stuff w/ it. But that's ok. The idea is tt this is a reasonable tradeoff of risk vs convenience.