techno.blog("Dion")

As I was following a car which was swerving all over the shop, I wondered why we hadn’t seen smart windscreens like we were promised.

The screen should be like a HUD. It could have a video feed of the rear (better than a read mirror), and other angles.

One small addition would be to project where the wheels are in the road. For the first time, people would REALLY see where their wheels are, instead of guessing. This would also help with parking the car.

Of course, if you think about it a ton of features could be added :)

If you go to Google Maps! you will see that the world has grown. Now, there is more than the US and oceans. Scroll to the right and you will see that Tony Blair has a place on the earth ;)

It was fun to visit the homeland. I was looking forward to seeing the satelite view of my old house, but that data isn’t there yet.

You can go to Google Maps! UK directly.

Which country will be next?

ps. I know Canada is there… but that is Bush’s 51st state right? :)

Kayak.com is a website that allows you to search for airfare and travel needs.

It has an interesting search UI.

Go ahead and do a search for a flight, and you will see that instead of the usual:

“I am searching, be back in a minute”

you get:

• I have done x out of y
• Here they are
• Feel free to stop me at any time if you have enough info
• Oh, and I am done now so here is everything

The funky changing display on the left is fun too. This is a lot nicer for me the user. I get feedback at the right time (when available), and I am engaged.

We have had simple web based email, Outlook Web Access, GMail, and more. Now Lazlo has gotten into the fray to create a rich Web Email application for Earthlink.

It will be interesting to see how a Lazlo-based system can give us some innovation. One thing I would be keen to know is if the app is available when offline, and if ‘tagging’ rather than the folder based system is applied.

I love my TiVo. However, one item that I really wish I could see in a OS upgrade would be a better way to handle season passes.

At the moment, if I add a season pass to a show, TiVo dutifully goes off into its data and does a nice sort, to see what conflicts exist.

At the end of this piece of work, I get shown where the conflicts are, and get a choice of:

• Record the shows which don’t have conflicts
• Record all of them
• Cancel the season pass

This just isn’t enough. I want TiVo to be able to show me the conflicts individually, and let me make a choice “A or B”. Then, if I choose one, go out and try to find the show I *didn’t record* on another time (this is why I wish big shows would run at 4am and the like so TiVo can find them then).

It is particularly annoying when you have shows like the Daily Show, which doesn’t seem to offer metadata. This means that if you have a season pass, TiVo will be recording the daily show every other bloody hour.

I wish we could force networks to give up the metadata, or maybe TiVo could do a hash of the show stream, and then if the new one matches, don’t record it again!

Ben had to add another CMS acronym didn’t he. He has been talking about the idea of taking the tough threading stuff out of the path of the Swing developer.

Now, after badgering us all about it, he blogs about it.

If a project can pull of the vision, it can only be a good thing. It is arguably necessary for Swing to be what it wants to be. With all the complexity that EJB brought, one of the nicest features was that the container would handle threading for you.

Let’s bring that to Swing, but let’s not call it CMS ;)

A friend pointed out the new ‘Satellite’ link on Google Maps.

Go to an address and hit it to see it kick in!

That is very very cool.

Now I just want Google to be more personalized friendly… and let me save common places so I don’t have to type my damn home address in all the time when I do directions ;)

Oh, and it will be really nice to get more map data in there (satellite runs out in many places, and europe will be a nice addition too ;)

And, wouldn’t it be nice to have state lines, lines around cities, etc etc. It can be hard to know what you are looking at sometimes when all you see is Satellite data.

It doesn’t even remember what you have typed before.

It is cool how the satellite work can piggy back off of the standard maps. Instead of mt.google.com there is now kh.google.com which returns the squares as satellite images rather than 2D maps. It is also interesting to see the subtle Google copyright as a watermark.

A friend pointed me to a (seemingly old) project called XMLTerm. XMLTerm is a mozilla based “A graphical command line interface”.

At first you may laugh, and ignore some of the security implications for now, but this could actually be quite cool.

Ajax could also come in to really help this out.

Some thoughts:

• % du: When you do a ‘du’, wouldn’t it be cool to show a pie chart usage as well as the numbers?
• % ssh [TAB]: tcsh came up with the ‘complete’ command, which lets you get smart with your tabbing. We can take that to a new level with a bit of UI integration. If you hit TAB after typing a command that needs a host (e.g. ssh, scp) then a select list can appear with your list of hosts
• % history: Since we can place cool widgets in places, we could have a history bar which would allow you to click on an item to rerun it. Command Line Suggest could also get pulled up if you TAB at the beginning of a command, showing a drop down on history.

The XMLTerm site itself has ideas on graphical ls which shows thumbnails, and a special cat which groks HTML, images, etc.

In theory, this could be an interesting marriage of the command line interface (power), and richer functionality (not just text).

Ben and I have had great feedback from the presentations that we have given on Ajax, so we created Ajaxian.com, as a place to talk about all things Ajax.

For instance, today we wrote about Handling usability concerns, such as the back/forward buttons, and bookmarking in the browser.

The entry talks about the opensource Dojo Toolkit, and its new bind() mechanism.

This is very cool. Although, it probably shows you what you thought was common sense, it is great to see true analysis.

A joint eye tracking study conducted by search marketing firms Enquiro and Did-it.com and eye tracking firm Eyetools has shown that the vast majority of eye tracking activity during a search happens in a triangle at the top of the search results page indicating that the areas of maximum interest create a