Great article on Atari games

Gamasutra's got a great article on the history and design of Atari games. Especially helpful for people like me, who don't know a thing about gaming :)

Getting Things Done with iPhone

So it's been a few days since I swapped out my BlackBerry for an iPhone, and one of the biggest iPhone omissions seems to be the non-existent to-do list. Exactly why such an important feature (and one that's built right into iCal on the Mac) got left out is beyond me... thankfully, though, there're a lot of alternative web apps for iPhone including Ta-da List and Remember the Milk.

Apparently the Omni Group are working on a version of OmniFocus for iPhone, which I'm sure will be fantastic, but since I'm using both a BlackBerry and iPhone, Remember The Milk seems like a better choice (MilkSync lets you synchronize tasks to a BlackBerry or Windows Mobile device). That said, with all the great things I've heard about OmniFocus, I'm sure I'll give it a whirl when it ships for iPhone.

Experimenting with a different to-do list gave me a great excuse to start fresh with my task list and build a reasonably clean "Getting Things Done" setup. So here's my experience with getting a GTD solution up and working on iPhone.

First I gave Ta-Da List a shot, and while it's a great for managing simple task lists, it's not really up to the task of being at the center of your to-do list management. There's no ability to search tasks, move them from list to list, or use tags or any other mechanism to otherwise label things. If you're looking for a super-simple flat to-do list for your iPhone, though, it's great, and the site works great on iPhone and because it's so light weight things load super quickly, even over the EDGE network.

Next up (and what I'm currently using) is Remember The Milk. I've got to say it's more than a little intimidating at the outset... all these lists, locations, tags, smart searches, etc. It took me a while to decide on the simplest way to work with it.

What I ended up settling on was a set of lists for important projects, and tags for contexts (e.g. @computer, @ping, etc.)



Oh, there's another aside... @ping is my context for calling or writing someone. Since I'm always on a smartphone, I'm pretty much equally able to send an email or call someone, so I don't have @online / @phone as separate contexts to reach out to people.

I also especially like the smart search lists... For example the "High priority" list is just a saved search for any task with a priority of 1-3. This way on my phone I can just tap on that list to see the most important next actions across all my lists and contexts.

The homescreen on the iPhone version is great and shows you tasks that are due soon, which is always helpful.



Tapping on "Lists" shows you all the lists you've got set up, including your smart lists, and tapping on a list shows you all the tasks in a clean and simple view. From this view you can pretty easily complete or modify the tasks you've got. Of course, you can also navigate by tags from the homescreen if you (like myself) use them for setting task contexts.







Launching the browser on iPhone, and waiting for the not-so-fast EDGE network (assuming you've got coverage) isn't the most fun when you want to quickly jot down a note, so RTM also lets you send yourself an eMail that gets converted to a task and put in the "Inbox" list, where you can later re-file it. I often find this to be much easier than waiting for the browser/network/etc.

What's missing? While Remember The Milk seems to really take advantage of AJAX and JavaScript, to make most actions pretty snappy, it's just not the same as having a native app sitting on the phone. If Apple decides to implement HTML 5 offline storage or Gears, I really hope the folks at Remember The Milk take advantage of it. They've already done a great job of supporting Gears on the desktop website, so my fingers are crossed. On the other hand, I'd be first in line to buy a native iPhone version of Remember the Milk if they happened to come out with one.

Ultimately PIM tools are only good if they're easy to use and don't make you wait for them. Right now the mobile web isn't quite there yet, but until an offline/native version of RTM or another app comes out, I'm pretty happy with RTM for Mobile Safari.

iPhone 2.0 wishlist

I've played with iPhone off and on ever since it launched, but this week I finally decided to swap out my BlackBerry and start using iPhone exclusively (more on why later). The brilliant browser, great media support, and gorgeous fonts/display make a huge impact, but there're a lot of things missing from iPhone that makes it a less-than-perfect experience, and leaves me longing for my BlackBerry pretty frequently.

So, as I'll be eagerly awaiting the new iPhone software at WWDC, here's my short wishlist for the next couple revs of iPhone software.

1. Copy and paste. Yes, everyone's mentioned this already... but creating calendar events is a pain when you can't just copy-paste straight from an email.



2. Search in the address book. Scrolling through the address book is probably okay with a couple hundred contacts, but is pretty laborious with a couple thousand.



3. Faster auto-complete in email addresses. iPhone is strangely slow when it comes to being able to search through your address book when you start typing a recipient's name for an email.



4. Faster SMS. Loading the SMS chat screens seems to be quite slow on iPhone.



5. Better eMail UI. I've got three email addresses set up on iPhone. The number of taps to see a message is enormous. Home -> Mail Accounts -> Chosen Account -> Inbox -> Message is annoying and slow. Single inbox like BlackBerry, please.



6. Signatures for each account. So each email address should have it's own signature, instead of the one global email signature. A requirement if you've got corporate and personal mail on the same device.



7. It would be great if iPhone could extract contact and event details straight from an eMail just like Mail.app does on Leopard.



8. Info on the lock-screen. I shouldn't need to slide to unlock and then enter my PIN just to find out if I have any new mail or not. It'd be great if the lockout screen showed missed calls, SMS and eMail.



9. To-do list. A striking omission.



10. A better calendar. Yikes... entering calendar events on iPhone is a chore... can't click the time I want straight on the screen. There's no weekly view (a shame, as it'd look great in landscape view on iPhone). Events don't support time zones.



11. Working push. The Yahoo! Push solution has been (for me) very flaky and far from a reliable push experience. I hope this gets solved for the next rev. Integrating push for GMail would also be lovely :-)

Maybe a hard-button or two on the casing wouldn't be such a bad thing either. I love the minimalist design of iPhone, but a couple extra hard-buttons might make it a whole lot easier to get to your favourite apps, and that can't be a bad thing.

Fingers crossed ... just a couple weeks till WWDC :)