Here is an amazing Video from year 1979 where two visionaries talk about how they see computing will take shape in the future. They talk about LED, Plasma, eBooks, eBook Readers, Tablets and What not!!.. It looks as if they had a peek in to the year 2010!. The video is on Tom Snyder interviewing Durk Pearson (Scientist)and Jerry Pournelle(Science Fiction writer). MUST Watch!

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[Update after the release]

Welcome iPad!. For now it sounds strange and not as good as iSlate or even iTablet. But that is what it is. So let us see how did I fare on my predictions! :-

1) I got it right. Apple calls themselves a ‘mobile company’ and iPad is a device between the iPhone and MacBook officially. +1

2) Obviously correct. +1

3) Correct. +1

4) eBooks and Magazine are both in! – 0

5) Keyboard is not 3D. and the Interface is same as iPhone too. – 0

6) Got it right. +1

7) MobileMe Cloud sync is not happening yet. -1

8) iPhone app compatibility is assured. +1

9) Still have to sync using USB :( -1

10) HTML5 widgets are supported over Safari and homescreen shortcuts.+1

11) All the games I saw during the event looks promising. We have to see the future success of it. – 0

———-

Ok. Here are my ‘obligatory’ Apple Tablet / iSlate predictions :-

1. iSlate would be a companion device to MacBook/iMac. Kind of a second screen – which is more mobile.
2. Users stream Music, Video, Photos, PodCasts, Magazines from iTunes to iSlate
3. Users carry iSlate around the home as a portable media player and use it as a photo frame
4. Steve Jobs will teach us a lesson or two on ‘Candela’ and make us believe that an LED backlit glossy iSlate is better for reading than e-Ink – before announcing NYT & WSJ partnership on e-newspaper delivery ;).  Books will have to wait.
5. iSlate will sport a 3D Soft keyboard/hand writing input method. I dont think Apple will make a ‘game-ish’ 3D home screen with interactive objects.
6. The device would come with and without support for a 3G modem and priced/subsidized accordingly
7. iSlate 3G will have support for multi-party iChat video conferencing
8. The iSlate will seamlessly sync all of your iPhone applications and their respective data over the air through MobileMe.
9. iSlate will introduce wireless syncing with the iTunes for the first time.
10. Developer support will include native HTML5 widgets apps to begin with.
11. iSlate will be the perfect portable gaming device ever created.

I will definitely revisit this list after the announcement on January 27th, 2010. :)

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Well, It’s not really a software hack!. I have a simple trick to completely ‘unlock’ the Kindle 2 Global Wireless options even while using in India / other restricted countries.

Unlocked Kindle 2 Features:-

• Complete browsing experience

• Ability to buy any books available on Kindle Store

Here is how you ‘unlock’ the Kindle:-

1. Keep Two Amazon accounts
2. Using one purchase a $20/$50 Amazon Gift Card.
3. Then top-up one of second Amazon account using the Gift Card
4. Register you kindle to use this Amazon Account.
5. Try to buy a Free Kindle E-book.
6. During this process, Change the “1 Click Buy Settings”, put a random USA address with correct PIN Code in the shipping details. This does not matter, as nothing physical will ever be shipped!
7. Thereon you will have a complete unlimited / unlocked Kindle experience!

What it does:-
The new Amazon account will be interpreted by Amazon as that of a Kindle Owner based out of USA, but on a long trip to India!. Hence the web browsing and unlimited Kindle store buying experience are available for this person (Free of Cost).

Will it be problematic?
If ever Amazon complaints that, you are trying to download/browse from a different country than USA, get any of your friends in USA to Fax them his identity information. OR alternatively you can change the address to your Indian address. Your purchased book should remain and that should solve the problem.  I sincerely hope Amazon does not block this alternative option – as it helps genuine Amazon Kindle users and book Buyers. I personally use this method not to browse, but to buy Kindle Books not available for India.

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An eBook reader has been on my wish list for a long long time – in fact, it even precedes the first generation Amazon kindle!. Back then I wrote a blog post comparing the eBook readers available in the market. The chance to buy a Kindle arrived when Amazon offered free shipping and lowered price for their “International Wireless Edition Kindle 2” during the Christmas. A friend in USA helped buy and bring it to me here in India.

The initial impression

Amazon Kindle 2 is a realistic replacement for Books. It is nice to hold, thin and controls for navigation are well placed. The letters on the screen are sharp and well contrasted. The graphics with 16 shades of grey appear nicer too. Reading on Amazon is a purely individual experience with no social touch to it (Perhaps that’s something Kindle rivals could aim at ;) )

The Good

• High contrast, Paper like display with no glare
• Good GPRS/EDGE connectivity all over India. I tested this in Kerala and Bangalore.
• Very thin and rugged (K2 is a great way to fall asleep ;) Sustained a drop yesterday without a single mark)
• The ‘Page turn’ speeds are acceptable.
• Easy dictionary lookup
• Free online Wikipedia access
• Good stereo speakers and MP3 support
• Calibre’s support for Instapaper makes Kindle a good offline reader for well formatted web content.

The Bad

• There is no Library management of any sort. There is no Book Cover Grid display. No support for Categories, Folders or Tags. This should be fixed in a Kindle Software update.
• The in-page jog stick navigation could be better
• The free general Internet Browsing does not work in India ‘due to local country restrictions’.
• The Magazine/Blog subscriptions strips the “Images” from the content for International wireless users of Kindle
• The native PDF rendering is just average with no support for Zooming, Search and Font resizing. The Calibre software comes to the rescue with excellent support for converting many file formats including PDFs to the Kindle supported format (.Mobi).
• Kindle books are costly (nearly $12) and many titles are not available to non-USA customers.

For now, I am enjoying the Kindle 2. The reading experience is really good and immersive with no distractions. If you are into technical manuals and PDF eBooks with complex formatting, you may opt for the Kindle DX, International wireless edition – with a bigger screen.

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2. Hardware e-book readers
3. Amazon S3 Storage Tools and Clients

I stumbled upon a gem of an iPhone app – MoneyStrands – today. It is an Online financial application,  with a notable exception that it works with majority of banks in India (ICICI Bank in my case) The previous one which I tried -  Mint (Web and iPhone apps) does not have support for Indian financial institutions. The other one which supports – Buxfer (with an iPhone Web App)  – unfortunately does not have a native iPhone app.

I could successfully aggregate my Savings, Credit and Loan accounts with MoneyStrands. You can even unify accounts from different financial institutions. They support over 8000 of them.

MoneyStrands ICICI Dashboard

The Interactive Charts are great to use too.

MoneyStrands Interactive Charts

MoneyStrands even supports allocating/tracking a Budget and Alerts for Balance.

MoneyStrands various Tabs

MoneyStrands iPhone application (iTunes Link) is free, just like their web offering.

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1. How to Sync Microsoft Outlook Tasks with iPhone and get Reminders
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3. Semi automatic Notes synchronization for iPhone

This is a post made through Textmate Blogging bundle. TextMate rocks!

Textmate blogging instructions are here.

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Einar Rosenberg , just dropped a bombshell  in my Inbox with this:-

Had to share this news. A highly reliable source has informed me that Apple has built some prototypes of the next gen iPhone with an RFID reader built in and they have seen it in action. So its not full NFC but its a start for real service discovery and I’m told that the reaction was very positive that we can expect this in the next gen iPhone. If Apple does it, expect every phone manufacturer and their sister to begin pumping out NFC enabled phones, at least for service discovery and sync. This just reinforces what we knew based on the two separate patents Apple submitted that had the iPhone enabled to read RFID tags. I’m told that the touch project video and the BT SIG’s specs were all driving forces to push this forward as well as other factors. Guess I’ll be touching my iPhone to my Mac to link them together to sync iTunes by next year.

This is really an amazing news. RFID Tags are getting ever popular these days to label, classify and track good of all sizes and values. Some of these tags can also store dynamic data. With these capabilities such tags can be used for various use cases like e-Couponing, Smart Posters, Smart Ticketing, and most importantly Mobile Payments.

If this becomes true, it would be a great journey for iPhone from the wonderful world of multi-touch to the touchless transactions!

Related posts:

1. Core Java on iPhone
2. How to Sync Microsoft Outlook Tasks with iPhone and get Reminders
3. Semi automatic Notes synchronization for iPhone

Do the above icons appear familiar to you?. Well, they all belong to popular OpenSource software on Linux, Windows and Mac. Tell the world you’re an OpenSource freak by naming each of them – in the comments!!

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The following list is being updated at the Google Wave Developer Preview (Sandbox). Reproducing here for everyone’s reference.

Google wave Extension List

Robots

(To use robots, add them as a contact, then add the robot-contact to a wave)

Chatbots

• Eliza – ogenex@appspot.com – An implementation of the Eliza chatbot borrowed from the NLTK.
• Elize – elizarobot@appspot.com – Is one of the first robots that was created by non Googler and is very useful if you are feeling alone in your Google Wave client.
• Rude chatbot – notatory@appspot.com – An obnoxious chatbot borrowed from the Natural Language Processing Toolkit.
• TooAngel Wave – In Progress – tooangel-wave@appspot.com – A self learning robot, that will respond to a reply in a more humanoid way

Conversion

• BotURL – boturl@appspot.com – A URL Linker that replaces full URLs with hyperlinks.
• Calcbot – calcbot@appspot.com – This bot will do in place calculations for simple mathematical expressions and allow you to use user defined variables.
• Cartoony – cartoonybot@appspot.com – Replaces the text of every submitted blip with a cartoon balloon that contains the text instead. Colors the balloons based on username.
• Dice Bot – dice-bot@appspot.com – Dice-rolling bot. Dice Bot will replace XdY (X is the number of dice; Y is the number of sides) with the results of those rolls.
• Flippy – flippy-wave@appspot.com – Turns text upside-down.
• Fnordlinky – fnordlinks@appspot.com – Replaces “PMID <number>” with article information from PubMed.
• Hearty Emobot – hearty-emobot@appspot.com – Replaces ASCII art with wingding characters.
• i-cron – i-cron@appspot.com – Evaluates Python expressions. Looks at blips in event, searches for CALC() macros and executes Python code using exec().
• Insulty – megabytemb123@appspot.com – Information Needed
• IPA Bot – ipa-bot@appspot.com – Changes normal letters into special characters used for phonetics.
• Piratify – piratify@appspot.com – Turns whatever you type into “Pirate Speak” .. Arrrr.
• Plotzie – plotzie@appspot.com – Plots sparklines from your data.
• Shortee – Wish – Change “c u l8r” to “see you later” etc.
• Swedish Chef – borkforceone@appspot.com – Changes english into Swedish-Chef Speak. Bork! Bork!
• Syntaxy – kasyntaxy@appspot.com – Syntaxy does blip-by-blip syntax highlighting for a variety of languages including Python, Java, C, C++, html, css and javascript.
• Watexy – watexy@appspot.com – Use LaTeX mathematical language in your Waves!
• Wikify – wikifier@appspot.com – Replaces specific marked up text with a link to Wikipedia or a description relevant to the marked text.

Games

• Hangman – wavehangman@appspot.com – Play Hangman.
• Roshambo – roshambowave@appspot.com – Play Roshambo (Rock / Paper / Scissors).
• Speedy – Wish – Track the words per minute of all participants, competitive typing!

Groups

• Groupy – groupy-robot@appspot.com – Robot to manage groups.
• Groupy – groupy-the-bot@appspot.com – Robot to manage groups.

Integration

• drop.io – mikeswaverobot@appspot.com – Creates a drop and puts the info into the wave whenever the robot is added as a participant.
• OpenAustrailia - In Progress – A robot to allow interaction with the OpenAustralia web site.
• PlonieBot – In Progress – ploniebot@appspot.com – Brings wave document editing capabilities to the Plone CMS
• Poppy - In Progress – poppywave@appspot.com – Helps bridge Google Wave conversations to email users outside the Wave.
• Rssybot – rssybot@appspot.com – Turn google wave into an RSS reader!
• Starify – starifybot@appspot.com – Lets you star waves, in sort of bookmarking style.
• Tweety the Twitbot – tweety-wave@appspot.com – You can access your Twitter account.
• Twiliobot – twiliobot@appspot.com – Transforms phone numbers into click-to-call links. If user clicks a link, a call is placed to his phone and to the number in the link. The call can be transcribed and inserted into the wave as text with a link to the audio.
• Wave-Email – In Progress – wave-email@appspot.com – Provide an extension to Google Wave which will allow the integration of both sending and receiving emails.
• Wave Live Messenger – wavelivemessenger@appspot.com – Allows you to chat to your windows live messenger contacts from inside a wave.

Language

• PhilBot – Wish – A suggested solution to the problem of waves with languages you can’t read.
• Rosy Etta – rosy@wavesandbox.com – Translator (40 Languages).

Polling

• Polly the Pollster - polly-wave@appspot.com – Poll Bot.

Search / Aggregation

• Dr Maps – dr-maps@appspot.com – Updates a wave by inserting a map associated to an address.
• Dr Weather – shiny-sky@appspot.com – Gives the weather for a City
• Embedded Search Results – wave-sandbox@appspot.com – Web and Image searches inline.
• FML Blipper – fmlblipper@appspot.com – displays random FML story from www.fmylife.com
• Grauniady – grauniady@appspot.com – Searches the latest items from The Guardian for a given phrase.
• Stocky – stocky-wave@appspot.com – Detects stock symbols from a wave and updates it with the live stock price.
• Wavethingy – wavethingy@appspot.com – Searches Amazon for DVDs and books, and gives the author a cut of any purchases made off the links.
• Yelpy – yelpful@appspot.com - Searches Yelp with a user defined location and category.

Utilities

• AmazonBot – amazon-withwaves-com@appspot.com – Enables social product research and shopping on Amazon.com. Wave participants can share products & reviews with contacts in real-time thanks to automatic queries by the AmazonBot against conversation keywords. The AmazonBot gadget can detect products and return inline product links or a custom full product browser.
• Bloggy – blog-wave@appspot.com – Information Needed
• Bit.ly Bot – bitly-bot@appspot.com – Shortens the url using bitly.
• Botty – Wish - Will automatically add a set of useful bots to a wave according to a collection of bots (so they don’t have to individually be added when you use them all the time.
• CountColon – countcolon@appspot.com – Adds text statistics to your blips (words, lines, etc.)
• Companion Sphere – companionsphere@appspot.com – Collection of geek utils, first working verb is “lookup” for wikipedia/wiktionary one-line descriptions.
• Databot – Wish – Will start as soon as the GData interface is published.
• Emoticony – emoticonbot@appspot.com – Replaces text representations of emoticons with the relevant image.
• JBREAKOUT BOT ADDED – jbreakout@appspot.com – Debug utility that reports event triggers.
• Maison – maison@appspot.com – Makes blips public at http://maison.appspot.com.
• Multi – multi-wave@appspot.com – A quote collector. Reply a blip you want to quote with ‘quote this’ and randomly display a quote with ‘quote <wave@account.com>’. The bot is still being under development but you can try playing with it.
• Natural Language Processing – knowledge-books@appspot.com – Adds blips with NLP analysis.
• Nokar – lab2market@appspot.com – Has many features such as translations, image insertion, insert last tweets etc.
• Posterous-robot – posterous-robot@appspot.com – A robot for posterous.com user to post blog in Google Wave. Here is how to write a blog using Google Wave Robot for Posterous.
• Publisher – wave-publisher@appspot.com – Information Needed
• Skimmy – wave-skimmy@appspot.com – Converts text emoticons, from : ) to img. Has a bookmarklet which creates a popup menu to insert emoticons for which the code is unknown.
• Smiley – smiley-bot@appspot.com – Changes the smiley symbols to smiley images.
• Smiley - In Progress – smiley-robot@appspot.com - Changes the smiley symbols to smiley images.
• Style Chart Robot – stylechart@appspot.com – Inserts a chart into a wave.

Wave Management

• Bouncy – bouncy-wave@appspot.com – Allows you to remove robots from a wave. Doesn’t seem to work on real people though, and laughs if you try to ask it to kick itself out. To get it to kick a bot out, type “bounce:name@domain.com”
• Linear – Wish – Enforce all replies to be to the main wave. If a user replies to a reply, remove it and place it as a reply to the main wavelet.
• Read Onlie – readonliebot@appspot.com – Records the original wave content. Whenever it’s edited, the content is replaced with the original. Simple as that.
• Seekdroid – seekdroid@appspot.com – You can list Robots, add them and find them out, easy to use. In continuous development. Website with all the information seekdroid.appspot.com.
• Sweepy – sweepy-wave@appspot.com – Remove empty, whitespace-only blips.
• Taggy – taggy-wave@appspot.com – Recognize #hashtags and add them as tags to the wave.
• Tocgen – tocgen@appspot.com – Table of Contents auto-generated and updated based on the h1,h2,h3,h4 in a wave.
• Twitusernames – twitusernames@appspot.com – Replaces all Twitter @username with links to the Twitter accounts.

Gadgets

(To use gadgets, once editing a blip, just click on the green puzzle piece,  and enter the url into the bottom text box)

Utilities

• Ajax Animator Gadget – In Progress – http://antimatter15.com/ajaxanimator/wave/manifest.xml – A fully integrated multi-user web based vector graphic animation authoring environment.
• AmazonBot Gadgett – http://amazon-withwaves-com.appspot.com/gadgets/AmazonProductList.xml - The AmazonBot gadget can detect products and return inline product links or a custom full product browser.
• Bidder – http://wave-api.appspot.com/public/gadgets/bidder.xml – Simple Auction.
• Checky – http://wave-gadgets.appspot.com/checky.xml – Basecamp-like checklists with drag-and-drop.
• Click me – http://wave-api.appspot.com/public/gadgets/hellowave.xml – Shows a button with a counter. Each time the button gets clicked, the counter is incremented by one. Shows off how the state interaction works.
• HTML- http://wave-ide.appspot.com/html.xml – Embed any HTML into a wave.
• <iframe> – http://wave-ide.appspot.com/iframe.xml – Embed any web page (as <iframe>) into a wave.
• iWave – http://gadget.wave.to/iWave/iWave.xml – Allows you to create a profile on wave to make wave just a little more personal. Uses facebook connect to retrieve your details if you sign in.
• Licensing – In Progress – http://wave-license.appspot.com/license_gadget.xml – Creative Commons RDF Embedding – Planning Stage.
• Maps – http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/101415471413908368316/mappy.xml -Embed Google Map.
• Napkin – http://my-wave-gadgets.appspot.com/wave/NapkinGadget.xml – Example of Flash/Flex Wave Gadget, similar to Whiteboard gadget above – source on Google Code.
• QuakeBot – In Progress – Server information on the Quake 3 protocol.
• Raffly – http://raffly.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/sandbox/raffly-xml1/raffly.xml – Insert this gadget to select a random participant from your wave to be the winner. The winner of what? Well that’s up to you :-)
• Ratings – http://google-wave-resources.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/samples/extensions/gadgets/ratings/ratings.xml – Lets participants rate and review a topic (movie, restaurant, etc) in a wave and shows a tally of the result.
• Slashdot Gadget – http://www.m1cr0sux0r.com/slashdot.xml – Loads latest Headlines from Slashdot.
• Troco – An experimental peer-to-peer currency –  http://troco.ourproject.org/gadget/org.ourproject.troco.client.TrocoWaveGadget.gadget.xml – Aims to provide a decentralized complementary community currency system, that is, a peer-to-peer currency system. Also you can see it as an IOU or promissory note based system. More info click here.
• Vector Editor – http://jsvectoreditor.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/wave/vectoreditor.xml – A cross platform collaborative real time vector graphics editor.
• Whiteboard gadget – http://vps.michaelrose.id.au/canvas.xml – Draw on a virtual whiteboard.
• Who is Coming? – http://wave-api.appspot.com/public/gadgets/areyouin/gadget.xml -Show a list of all people that have said whether they will come or not.

Games

• Backgammon – Wish – Remove all of one’s own checkers from the board before one’s opponent can do the same. [Wikipedia]
• Battleship – Wish – Displays different board based on user.
• Boxes – In Progress – Connect lines to make boxes and win.
• Cards – http://wave-cards.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cards.xml – Play card games.
• Chess – http://gerculanum.appspot.com/gadgets/com.example.chessgadget.client.ChessGadget.gadget.xml – Play chess.
• Connect 4/Four-in-a-row – In Progress – sdunster@wavesandbox.com – http://www.sdunster.com/wave/four.xml – 2 users + observers, turn locking, just waiting to write win-detection code.
• Floodit – http://gadget.wave.to/floodit/game.xml – 2 player race to fill a board with colors.
• Magnetic Poetry – http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/107558585548952247431/fridge-11.xml – Re-arrange random words to form poetry.
• Match them colors! – In Progress – Match 3 / gem matching game.
• Othello – Wish – Play Reversi.
• Sudoku – http://blah.appspot.com/wave/sudoku/sudoku.xml – Play Sudoku.
• The Button – http://hyperthese.net/wave-gadgets/the-button.xml – A useless (I mean USELESS) game.

Hooks

• CVS integration – Wish – CVS history can be converted into a wave with playback.
• GIT integration – Wish - GIT history can be imported and played back (dffs).
• SVN integration – Wish - SVN History can be converted into a wave with playback.

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So You were fortunate enough to be invited to the Google Wave first party!. Once you login you will see a Welcome wave which has links to installing various Google Wave extensions. Here are two ways I found to embed Twitter functionality within Google Wave.

Using Tweety-Wave

Add “tweety-wave@appspot.com” in to your Contacts. Then create a new Wave and drag and drop Tweety-Wave in to the Wave. Then the Gadget will be automatically be opened within the Wave content box. Please remember to enable popup(s) for the Wave webpage. A Twitter oAuth page will appear asking you to authorize Tweety-Wave app to publish Tweets on your behalf. Now you can tweet directly from this wave.

Through TwitterGadget

Create a new private wave. Click on the “Add Gadgets by URL” and enter the values as “http://www.twittergadget.com/gadget_gmail.xml”

Related posts:

1. My third Google Wave – embedded
2. Comprehensive Google Wave Extensions List