The next big form factor

Glasses, maybe contact lens - maybe.

Although I would bet on something related to ubiquitous flat panel displays happening first. Easier. Here now.

But more important - the above are output devices. I think what we really need is ubiquitous input. Talking to yourself at the refrigerator: I need milk and blueberries.

What would this look like?

Partially explicit sorting

A pattern I run into a lot: partially explicit sorting.

E.g. a regular linear sort - alphabetical, breadth or depth first, etc. - is okay for the "leftovers", but I have an explicit priority ordering of things I want to see at the head of the list.

More advanced, what I did for automatically deducing a print order in the Cp/PL wikified manual / specifications:

• Create a manual table of contents
• Attach unlinked items to where first linked to, alphabetically ordered.  

Have also played around with topological sorting, modified by the desored explicit ordering.

ISO: nice Perl / foobar language iioms to do this common pattern.

Easier to process less important stuff

Ever notice that it is easier to process less important stuff than more important stuff.

Email especially - but I have noticed the same thing with classification jobs, such as classifiying and rating patents.

Email especially - sort the email by sender, by subject, etc.   If I had the ability to cluster by keywords.

"Sorting, not searching".

On this trip I have been able to empty literally thousands of emails from my account.  But the last hundred are non-uniform, and are more of a hassle to handle.

For these last, I need an efficient manual scan - buttons for archiving, action required, deferred, etc.  The GTD stuff, maybe a few more.

Unfortunately, I don't have such a simple email scanner.