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Maybe it's just a genetic predisposition to think things were better, so as to have a higher standard of what things should be in order to progress the human race?

"What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?"

-- Plato, 4th Century BCE

I've been watching a lot of Mad Men recently, and I did enjoy it to begin with but soon realised I was seeing the same story being told again and again.  I think what kept me coming back though was not the stories, but the feel that it captured for an era that I am only slightly aware of, and which I see poking out from people of that generation that I interact with every now and again. 

I think the producers of the show knew this too, and look to have acknowledged it in their first season with the following clip, where a fictional meeting was held with a group of advertising executives (the main characters in the show) pitching a campaign to Eastman Kodak using nostalgia to sell their Carousel slide projector.

I think the same appeal also holds true for something else I've been watching recently too, BBS: The Documentary, which goes goes through the bulletin board era in the United States.  (The entire documentary is a 3 DVD set which can be ordered via the web site, but has also been released under creative commons).

Coming out of it, and during the whole thing, it brought back memories that I'd thought I'd forgotten.  Every new memory it brought back, like the differences between baud vs bps, the region / node system on FidoNet, I got a twinge, and with every twinge I was forced to watch in the hope it would bring more.  

It reminded me of how I would spend hours dialing into my board list in Terminate (which I think was my first ever software purchase, and which I still may have the original floppy disk for somewhere back in Auckland).  How I would pick my top 10 boards, set to auto retry and then slump my way into the other room to watch TV and prick my ears for the sound of a CONNECT 14400/ARQ/V34/LAPM/V42BIS. 

Then once connected, getting my allocated 20 to 30 minutes to check my messages on the board, play a few door games, and check new files which were available.  Any files which I found that I wanted, I would then have to mark them and download them the next day when I connected as by the time I did all that, my time for the day would have been used up.  Then once disconnected from that board I'd slump my way back to the TV and start the the whole thing again.

I loved it, and watching the documentary made me think just how good things use to be but when I sit down and really think about it they weren't.  It was just the feeling obtained from reliving old memories which made us think  we had more fun when we were younger, but in actual fact we'll probably be looking back in 10 years time thinking the exact same thing that we do now.

I'm not sure if that thought is depressing or enlightening :)

1. The ability to create a user account on the web app
   
2. The ability to log into the web app with that user account
3. The ability to add / update / delete private information for that user account
4. To have all of the above stored securely
   

This system then has to be implemented on every single web app on the Internet, but because not everyone is the same, every web app will implement this differently and not always in the most secure way.

One of the solutions to this is OpenID, which attempts to offload the identity system onto a third party provider.  This means any web app which supports OpenID doesn't have to write the login / identity system as all of that is taken care of by the (trusted) third party provider.

Though it is a good idea, OpenID does have its problems and it also isn't the easiest system to explain to people, which may also explain its slow adoption. 

Aza Raskin (son of Jef Raskin) has posted an entry recently on his blog about a new feature he's been developing for Firefox, where instead of your identity being managed by a third party provider, it is managed by your local browser. 

From what I've read, it appears that all your user information is stored on your local machine in the browser (and potentially on OpenID servers).  When you first log into a web app, you decide what information to share with the server and Firefox takes care of the rest.

Some of the use cases on the wiki page sounds very interesting, especially the mass password reset, in the case of notebook theft as most people have cookies / saved password stored in their browsers. 

It will be exciting to see what happens to this in the upcoming months and I can see this getting quite popular if they get the implementation right. 

To enable, just click on the menu drop down on subscriptions and select "Use favicons" and you should be away!

Yay!

Below is the ringer set to the "ring" state, which rings the ringer and (if set) vibrates the phone. 

Below is the ringer sent to silent, which no longer rings the ringer and (if set) vibrates the phone. 

It's by far the fastest way I've seen on any phone to change the ringer to "silent".  Even on my beloved 8310 I had to perform the following steps to do this:

1. Hit the Menu button
   
2. Hit star "*" (to unlock the phone)
   
3. Hit the power button (to bring up the ringer profiles menu)
   
4. Hit the arrow key down once (to select the silent ringer profile)
   
5. Hit select
6. Hit the Menu button
   
7. Hit star "*" (to lock again)
   

Because the process for setting the phone to silent was quite long, I didn't find myself using it much, and because I didn't use it much, when it came time to have my phone on silent I never remembered to do so.  

Now I use the feature all the time.  I.e. at work when I'm at my desk, instead of leaving my phone on I now habitually flick the silent switch before I sit down, and as I leave I do the opposite.  I've been also finding myself doing the same thing in meetings and in movies too, almost without thinking.

I watched the Objectified documentary recently and found the following clip very enlightening on how Apple design their products (which I've seen reflected in the feature I highlighted above), especially the following sequence where Jonathan Ive makes the following quote.

It's one of those funny things.  You spend so much more time to make it less conspicuous and less obvious, and when you think about it, so many of the products you're surrounded by, they want you to be very aware of just how clever the solution was.

When the indicator comes on [on an Apple notebook], I wouldn't expect anybody to point to that as a feature. But at some level I think you're aware of a calm and considered solution that therefore speaks about how you're going to use it.  Not the terrible struggles that we as designers and engineers had in trying to solve some of the problems.

I found it by going into the Photos application, selecting a photo and then tilting the screen horizontally.  I then clicked on the screen shot circled below, and got the screen shot above:

Fiddling around with the new control, it looks like it's a scrollable list, but it doesn't really make sense in this case as they aren't any more items to display off the screen.  The scrolling was also extremely laggy (I'm currently on a 3G), and this new control doesn't look to be implemented anywhere else.

Below is the default control when in the Mail application, which I think more than does the trick, and seems more consistent with the rest of the iPhone UI.

"The traffic information on Google Maps comes from data provider Intelematics Australia and is sourced from data from other motorists.

"This means motorists provide information on current traffic conditions by setting their mobile phone up to share anonymous data."

Too bad (or is that luckily?) the iPhone can't run background apps.  

It was probably one of the longest periods I've been with the same phone, but it was the combination it being a no nonsense straight to the point phone, and also being extremely small and light weight which kept me constantly buying new face plates for it every 6 months in an attempt keep it looking brand new for the (close to) 4 years I had it. 

It wasn't until one day it took one too many drops on the concrete that I had to find a replacement, and I did hunt around on the second hand market for another 8310 replacement but realistically replacing an old phone with yet another old phone wasn't the most appealing thing to me, which is a shame as to be honest as I never really found another phone I liked as much until I got my iPhone (but the iPhone is a smart phone and can't really be compared to a pure mobile phone like the 8310).

Another of my favourite possessions is my 2nd gen iPod Nano which (I think) runs in the same vein as the 6300 as it was a small and light, no nonsense, no lag, straight to the point music player which didn't pretend to be more than what it was suppose to be.

I (fortunately) still have my 2nd gen Nano, but my original 8310 was lost during a move, and I never really replaced it till recently a friend found her old 8310 and decided to donate it to me knowing how much I felt for my old 8310.

Below are some pictures of my recently acquired 8310 side by side with my 2nd gen Nano and I have to admit the similarities between their form factors are remarkably close, and I wonder if it's something inherent about that size which makes it seem like the perfect piece of personal electronics?

Since I heard that, I've been casually checking petrol prices and never really noticed a pattern, till I did some research and found some results from the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) website. 

Here is a chart from the site below: