applications

After yesterday's post about how, apps aside, browsers really are a big part of our online future, this seemed to fall right in place:

[H]owever exciting the app store might be—there is no rational reason to neglect the most obvious iPad news platform: The website. The chance that you sell your app will only rise if your have a strong presence in the browser—given, that it’s worth the money. Developing an HTML based news app is not just cheaper and faster, it also gives you more editorial and technical control over your contents. More importantly, HTML-apps are in many ways more convenient for the user: They’re easy to use, they’re more medium appropriate and in that sense: more appealing and—they’re free. No long downloads, no “how do I get to…”, no weird crashes, no trouble to share, copy, paste, comment, tweet, link to. They just work.

[This post appears on BlogHer.]

I did it. After months of bitching out loud to my friends and colleagues, tweeting about it and blogging it, I dropped AT&T (and thus the iPhone) and got back on Verizon with the Motorola Droid. I thought it would be a rough transition, but it turned out to be not so bad. In fact, the Droid is a pretty slick device. But, like any "smart" tech these days, it's not truly yours until you've customized it, put your mark on it. And on the Droid, like the iPhone, that starts with the apps.

Now, I've had my Droid – I've named her "Zora" (and you Blade Runner geeks can guess why) – for only a few days, so I haven't gotten far in the app exploration. I've generally avoided paying for most apps (which is why paid apps are the topic for a subsequent post), but there's a lot to be had for free.

Here are a few....

Task management can be a challenge if you have a lot of stuff going on. "Urgent" things are always distracting you: the phone rings, colleagues interrupt you, a client asks for help, emails, newsletters, snail mail, IMs, Tweets....

You could be buzzing like a bee, getting a whole lot of things done, but not getting done the right things.

I would love to be using a Franklin-Covey Planner program on my Mac, but they don't make one for Mac. So the choices are:

When I would talk or write about the semantic web, microformats, RDF and all that, people would often ask, "Why? Who cares?" or shudder with a "That's creepy!" Images of Big Brother tracking every move, to be indexed, measured and evaluated for Ungood behavior, or something like that. At best, people could see a kind of abstract benefit from making information more digestable by machines, you know, in the interest of having a sense of general order in the Interwebs or something.

But what about when the semantic web yields dividends back to the human experience?

It's just a little thing out of what's possible – a mere smidge of cobbled together APIs – but Mozilla Labs Ubiquity (a Firefox plug-in) is really something to see, for it gives you a peek into the kinds of things that will be possible (and now already area) with an Internet that has semantic meaning.

Check out this video, that's very much to the point: