On the usefulness of tablet computers

I recently read an interesting article on TechCrunch which talks about the 6 or so operating systems geared towards tablets which will soon have to face a battle for who gains the most popularity in the limited market of tablet PCs.

Linda Lawrey posted this article on her Google Buzz which sparked a discussion about who might be coming out as winner, but it also generated a conversation about why anyone would want a tablet in the first place. I think 3+ million iPad owners would have something to add to that conversation, however, my post is not about that.

I personally believe tablets are useful for certain things today: While not exactly great for use on-the-go such as mobile phones they are useful as a replacement for net-books, say, for use while having a coffee at Starbucks, for taking notes while at meetings, or as a bed-side computer to check mail and browse the web before bed. But my thoughts about their usefulness are centred on the future: Internet-powered centralised intelligent home & office devices.

I can see them integrated to each room in a house, possibly on the wall, where one can quickly browse their calendar, program their alarm, control the lights of the house, communicate with the house’s security system, view CCTV video from other rooms and program DVR recording, control other digital devices from their room, etc.

Imagine: You’re going to bed so you go to your wall and program the alarm clock for 8 AM, you also program your children’s alarm clock for 7:30 AM, activate the home security system, and set up chilled-out relaxing music for the bedrooms in the house. You also program the device to start up the radiators at 6:00 AM and the hot water at the same time. At the same time you set up the A/C to maintain a certain ideal room temperature during the night. John, your kid, doesn’t like the music so he gets up and sets his own device to mute for his room. You wake up to the sound of music, increasing gradually in volume in each room, as a start to a great new day.

You might have a party that evening and you are having a discussion about a certain word definition, or the location of a country, so you get up, unplug the tablet from the wall, and perform a search on Wikipedia, bringing the tablet to the table and sorting out the discussion in moments.

In the office, you create a powerpoint presentation with interactive graphs and cool pictures on your PC. You store it on the local network, pop in to the conference room, take a tablet down from the wall, then you can discuss the points and make changes directly on the tablet, making the meeting a more productive one than the usual guy talking in front of a projector while people take notes. Not good enough? Connect a pico-projector to it, then you can have your boring meeting with the capability of making changes or taking meeting notes directly on the tablet, which makes the use of paper basically redundant.

So how useful do you believe they are? Useful enough right now? Or more useful in the near future?

My Social Network Map

Three days shy of a year ago I published a blog post about my social networks in which I explained a bit about the interconnectivity provided by sites such as Ping.fm which help you keep your status updates synchronised across social networks.

Last year I was on about 10 social networks, this year the number has gone up to 17 (which is  really19 as I excluded Google Reader and WordPress.com for visual purposes). But it seems to me that interconnectivity has still not matured enough, there is no “home” for your social networks, and I doubt this will change in the short term.

Click on the image to see a full-sized version.

The Hax Life

Try beating one o’ these guys:

New Theme

I’ve decided to purchase a premium theme at last. After years of using free themes I decided it was the right time. My first thought was to buy Thesis, which is widely recommended by blogger Chris Brogan. However, I decided it was not exactly worth the amount of money, considering I blog just for fun and not because I expect to make a profit out of it.

Therefore I have chosen to pay for a yearly subscription to Elegant Themes, and have chosen Bold as my theme. I think it represents my website much better, as it is much easier to access recent posts, and get at what you want in an easier way. I’d like to hear your comments on it to know if it was really worth it or not. What do you think?

A universal programming language?

A random thought popped into my head not so long ago: What if we had a universal language that integrated all the common programming language syntaxes, integrating the binaries, engines and function calls for each of them, allowing anything to be written in any language in each file?

.NET made huge progress allowing a single project to be coded with different languages, at file-level of course. But what if we could use several languages in a single file?

I know this would probably represent a heavy strain on the processing part of it, but for web-based technologies it would be an interesting approach. Just imagine, Rails+PHP+Python+Java, a world where we can truly live together. Or not?

Take the following code as an example:

cout << "Hello world" << endl;
echo "This is a test";
System.Windows.MessageBox("And another test");
print "Just for the sake of it"

Assuming you can keep it clean, and standards are adopted, I think it would be great. Things might be simpler in certain languages than in others, and sometimes it would certainly be reflected in the amount of lines as many languages implement built-in functions that perform many tasks with a single line of code.

On the other hand, it could become programming hell, but I’d be interested if such a thing existed, for the mere purpose of having fun. What do you think? Would it be “programming hell”? or does it actually sound viable?