All of that craziness aside, there are some things people who closely follow this kind of news know will almost certainly make it to Cupertino’s next big seller. An A5 processor, improved RAM (1GB perhaps, though we will never get the official specs) and an 8MP camera that will kick ass and deliver better results than any other phone camera are pretty much certain at this point. The big rumor, which we expect to come true, is of course, the awesome voice commands / assistant feature. After all, in today’s market, Apple needs to have a (oh, I hate using this word) “killer” feature that will keep the phone interesting for a year while Android churns out about a dozen or so good ones in the same timeframe. And let’s not forget Windows Phone. We all know it has potential too.

We all have wish lists. I had published mine prior to the iOS5 announcement and even got some of them come true (yaay!). What I’d like to talk about now are my wild predictions for the next iPhone, which will almost certainly not make it to reality. The top predictions are:

So, what do you think of these predictions? What are your own predictions and wish lists? Remember, extra points for chipping in before October 4th

1. Custom / User Editable Dictionary
Why oh why oh why, iOS?!? Why can’t you give users a custom / user-editable dictionary? Surely this cannot be a difficult thing to implement. Yes, there are hacks of getting non-standard words that are used regularly to not be auto-corrected or be marked as an error, but why can’t we have this as a built-in functionality? iOS already gives users the ability to choose replacements for selected words. Why not have a dictionary option too, where the user can add the word in question to the dictionary? Combine this with a section within Device Settings to see all the words that have been added to the dictionary, to add more right there or to delete some that might have been added incorrectly or are no longer used. Having this feature built-in means reduced annoyance in everyday usage.

2. Better handling of notifications
Apple introduced push notifications back in iOS 3.0 as a better means to preserve battery life than background processes. It was a really good feature when it started working, giving users notifications from various apps, without having to have the apps actually running. Here is my problem with this system, now that so many many apps use push notifications.

Push notifications usually include an alert that pops up to notify the user of something (say, a new IM). The user can then choose to go to the app immediately or ignore the notification for the moment. The problem with this way of handling notifications is that if you are unavailable (a meeting, sleeping, just not interested then etc), you get one notification on top of another and you will end up having to ignore at least some of these notifications. Once you do, you then have to then scroll through your pages of apps looking for the little red badge to see which apps gave you notifications.

It would be so much more usable if there was a central area where all notifications went to live once the user dismissed them. These would then go off this area as and when the user actually went to the app (the process currently used to get rid of the badge indicator). This would mean that a user can attend to a push notification alert immediately (as is currently the case) or choose to ignore it and go to one location and find all such ignored notifications later on.

3. A beside mode / clock
Okay, this may sound lame, but it makes my top 3 list for a reason. But first, some background. Other mobile operating systems such as BlackBerry have what is called a bedside mode, which amongst other things dims down the display, turns off keyboard lights, notification lights and in some cases even automatically selects a suitable sound and notification profile. And when this is combined with displaying the built-in clock, a user gets a bedside clock which adjusts brightness with respect to the ambient light.

Sure there are many apps on iOS that act as bedside clocks, even accessories that help hold the phone in a particular way and charge it while this happens. But they all lack a couple of important features (because developers do not have access to this). The first is the ability to truly adjust the display brightness by using the ambient light sensor. Some apps do offer brightness control, but the effect is never one that is as good as when the system itself reduces the display backlight. The second annoyance is when a push notification (yes, that again) comes in and hijacks the screen when using such bedside clock apps.

So, a simple solution would be if iOS added a bedside mode with a gorgeous clock or gave developers access to suppress push notification alerts and the ability to adjust display brightness based on the ambient light conditions.

So, those are my top three feature requests for iOS (version 5 perhaps, since 4.3 doesn’t seem to want to offer these, from what we see in the developer betas). What are your top picks for new features?

The original artist for this song is Baz Luhrmann and you can get the CD here or buy the MP3 from here.

“You cannot ascribe cosmic significance to an earthly event. It’s pure coincidence.”

This dialogue from one of the recent movies got me thinking and prodded me to re-look at my career. Call it quirk of fate or coincidence, I joined my friend & college mate, and tried my hand at helping him with his training venture, which focusses on offering training programs for students, while I was taking a break from – regular, usual, you-know-what-I’m-talking-about, IT job. My interest in technology combined with the excitement I derived from the training domain led me into exploring a viable business enterprise. Voila! EdLog Solutions born.

At EdLog Solutions, we aspire to become an end-to-end service provider in the learning and development space. Our experience in developing and delivering the training programs has helped us evolve an optimum model for training and development. Through feedback and constant improvement, we have understood the key elements in maximizing training effectiveness and we are now in a position to utilize this model towards specialized training requirements such as blended learning and eLearning solutions.

While our primary service offering is training solutions, we also offer web design and development. In today’s web world, establishing a web presence is critical for any organization, especially for newer ones. What better way to do this than start with a website? This service is mainly targeted at start-ups, small/mid-sized companies. That said, we also work with corporations on revamping their websites.

Please visit their site at www.edlog-solutions.com and have a look around.

Well, those two observations are sort of related, as Windows Vista and 7 block programs from launching automatically at start up, if they require admin access. While some of you are thinking UAC annoyance, my thought is more towards “good security feature”. I actually appreciate this feature. The irritating part comes when apps that you know and trust don’t launch the way you want them to, as is the case with Everything.

Well, there is a work-around that takes a 5-minute one-time setup. But before I proceed with giving you the details, I must stress that UAC does serve a purpose and that you need to do the following only with a limited and strict set of apps that you really trust and need to launch with admin access at startup.

I am not going to list the steps one by one here, since there is already an excellent article by Greg Shultz, up on TechRepublic, where he details the steps with screenshots and explanations. He uses Event Viewer (a built-in Windows app) in his example, and consequently, in his last step (Figure F on his post), the shortcut for the app is given as C:WindowsSystem32eventvwr.msc. You would obviously replace this with the full path of the app that you want to launch (in the default installation of Everything, for instance, it would be C:Program FilesEverythingEverything.exe). The other is that he uses Windows Vista in his example, but it works just the same in Windows 7 as well.

Click here to head on over to TechRepublic to read Greg’s post.

What if I told you there was a search app for Windows that would make even the Mac guys go whoa at the speed in which results are populated, or indexing is done, or new files are added to the index? What if I further told you that this program is so lightweight that you would never notice it running; heck the installer is less than 400kB!

Excited? The program is called Everything Search Engine and it is made by a company called voidtools. It is simple and it is small (download the installer from their site). It installs in under a minute and wait, it finishes its indexing before you can return from your bathroom break. It really is that good!

It has a really simple user interface – search box and the results window directly below.

Everything Search Window

The results start popping up as you start typing and narrow down to the files that meet your criteria once you are done. You can right click on a result and choose from all of your standard Windows Explorer contextual menu items (open, open with, copy, paste, send to etc). The only downside to this app is that it does not have the capability to search for text within a file. It simply searches by file name alone. But for most of us, that is what a file search is most useful for.

Oh, and one final thing – if you have your hard disk formatted to NTFS, make sure that the Enable USN Journal Logging option (Tools > Options >> Volumes tab) is checked. USN, for those who are interested, is a Windows file system feature that maintains a real-time log of all changes made to files on the volume.

So, go ahead, give Everything a try. It is free and it will change your life… enough to make you come back and say, “thank you, for Everything”

It’s been almost a year since I’ve left Cognizant – the place where I started my professional career. On my last day, I had taken a few photographs, some of which I used to put together a slideshow. Well, that’s what you see above. Some fond memories, some really good friends and one helluva great fun loving team.
Originally posted on Sunday, August 30, 2009