On my Android phone (running Cyanogenmod), when I press the power button it presents me with a PIN lock screen:

iPhones and stock Android phones show something similar (although at least on my iPad, I have to swipe first, and then enter a PIN to unlock).

Today, wanting to work out a quick sum, I reached for my phone and realised that the unlock screen is so close to being what I instantly needed, but instead I had to unlock, swipe one screen left to reach the calculator, tap it, and then get to work.

Perhaps some small modifications could be made to the PIN lock screen to make it useful as a calculator? For example, an out-of-the-way button on the left of the screen could activate a calculator mode.

Once in the mode, one of course can bang out some sums:

Excuse the rough Photoshopping, but you get the idea. Adding complexity to the lock screen system would mean more code to vet carefully for security flaws, but otherwise, the PIN lock would still serve its purpose.

In September, I picked up Native Instruments’ Maschine, a MPC-like groove/beat workstation. Maschine itself is a combination of hardware and software. Alone, the hardware does very little – the sequencing, sampling and effects all takes place on your computer. To Native Instruments’ credit, the system is designed such that you can entirely focus on the hardware and ignore what’s happening on the computer screen. The workflow is fantastic and the hardware itself has an excellent feel to it.

While this is all fine and dandy, it would be very cool if there was an iPad app which could assume the role of the PC software – allowing you to plug your Maschine directly into an iPad without a computer required. The brains would run on the iPad, perhaps running a super stripped-down version of the full Maschine software. An on-screen X/Y pad might be handy as well as a scale-fixed note entry buttons, but really, it would be ideal if the hardware roughly worked as it does when connected to a PC. The iPad and Maschine combo would make Maschine a nicely portable beast and much better positioned against its traditional, self-contained competition.

Just a dream.

Update August, 2010 Facebook has now implemented something like this.

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Facebook is now a ubiquitous social network utility, available practically on any device. It has a notion of status, which has more recently been adapted to encourage Twitter-like microblogging. It also has a notion of location, which can be applied to your own profile as a ‘home’ location, as well as events and pages such as those for pubs, stores and other venues. There is a huge number of logical entities defined with full metadata such as homepage, street address, contact number and so on. It could be the next world-wide Yellowpages (it would be great if they supported microformats to spread the machine-readable data). There are also services which run in-browser (sometimes with the help of a plug-in) and allow you to geo-position yourself based on your connecting network address or what WiFi radios are nearby (such as Yahoo’s Fire Eagle, Mozilla’s Geode and Skyhook’s Loki).

What is needed is a way of linking these up in order to enable wide-scale location-based services. When I pull up Facebook on my phone or computer, it should quite reasonably be able to tell where I am and show a list of nearby events, friends and locations without any user intervention. I should be able to optionally advertise that I am at a particular location, much like the way it works when you attend an event currently. Perhaps locations (such as pubs and cafes) could offer some kind of value-added services for patrons who advertise their location. For example, a free coffee refill, or link them with the location’s own web-based services, such as influencing the music queue, or seeing what events are planned.

Looking around at the cafe I am in right now (which indeed has its own Facebook page) I see Facebook screens flashing up on computers all over the place. Now is the time to take advantage of Facebook’s ubiquity and let these people find each other and connect with the location.

In Oslo, it’s not uncommon to see people walking around town with ski boots on as they head off skiing, Ski boots, be they cross-country, alpine, telemark or any other kind of nutty boutique boots they use here, are not really designed for walking on city streets, particularly icy and snowy streets.

Why the heck can’t we buy a little rubber booty or sock that slips on to the hard boot surface and provides some additional traction? Boots are hard and have a regular form, surely it wouldn’t be too hard to design something that could be slipped on and stays on securely.

Update May 1st: Looks like it has already been done: Walk-EZ

I used to have a Nikon Coolpix which had a feature called “best shot selector”. Choose that mode, fire off a burst of shots, and the camera only keeps the sharpest one. Why the heck is this feature missing on DSLRs? In Adobe Lightroom, why can’t I select a bunch of photos all of the same subject, and then choose ‘order by sharpness’ or something like that to pick the sharpest photos from a series?