features

One feature I miss in mobile communications

In the last five years mobile phones became much cheaper and much more feature rich. They do everything from call and contact mamangement to web browsing and photography. There is still one feature that I would really like to see implemented.

When someone calls me, I see the originating phone number. If the number is in my address book, then I also see the name of the person and possibly his/her picture. If the number is not in my address book, I get no information about the caller what-so-ever.

It would be nice to get both the name and the picture from the caller, if he’s not in my addressbook. There are a few ways to implement this, I guess. Either use the phone profile or have a centralized directory as a telecom service. With centralized directory land phones can be also associated with names and pictures. This way I will always know is calling me and I won’t have to keep five billion contacts in my addressbook.

Can I have it before Christmas? Next year? Please?

The sweet del.icio.us inbox

This time I am one of the last people to discover the new feature – Delicious inbox. And I will write about here anyway, because new people are born every day and eventually they will grow up old enough to need to know about it. And when they do, there is a chance that they will read about it here and not on every other page on the web.

So, Delicious inbox is a sweet feature that allows you, as a user, to subscribe to bookmarks made by certain other users, or marked by certain tags, or both. From now on, you don’t have to subscribe one billion RSS feeds to find out what’s hot in “photography”, or “parenting”, or what your wife has been bookmarking, or what your sysadmin has learned about Linux. You can get all these in one nice RSS feed from your Delicious inbox.

It’s easy to ignore the rest.

Missing Bloglines functionality. Take two.

Last time I tried to complain about missing functionality at Bloglines I got everything wrong. I acknoledged the fact, but my ego wanted a revenge. It wanted me to find something that is really missing so that I could write a proper post on the subject. After lots of thinking and playing around with other tools, I finally found a good issue to complain about – synchronization automation.

Here is what I mean.

Continue reading Missing Bloglines functionality. Take two.

Missing Bloglines functionality

After some poking around I found another piece of functionality that is missing from Bloglines, but which I’d appreciate very much to have. I am talking about feed-based item sorting. Currently, there is a global setting which one could use to specify the way to order the items in the feed – new items first or old items first. But this is not enough.

As an example, consider two different feed sources – a news site and a forum. For the news site I’d like to have newest items first. This way, if I missed on the feed, I can go directly to the most current news and play a catch-up game later. With the forum, on the other hand, I would prefer to go through old messages first to understand where the discussion started and how it progressed. It has to do with continuity I guess. News from the news site are not so often connected to each other. They are separate pieces of content. Forum discussions, on the other hand, tightly link posts together and it is often difficult to understand what’s going on without reading earlier part of the thread.

~~As things are now, it is impossible to sort different feeds in the different way.~~

Update: The functionality is there. I just never saw it. Sorting can be changed by clicking on the ‘Sort Newest First’ link under the name of the feed. Thanks to Constantinos for pointing it out.

Bloglines missing functionality

With all my praises of Bloglines you might be thinking that I am hiding some drawback of this service to make it look better. I can understand that, but that’s not true. I am indeed seeing Bloglines in the positive light most of the time. When I don’t I let you know with the same ease as I do with all my praises.

Today I realized that Bloglines is missing one important feature that I need. I didn’t need six month ago. I just started to need it now. And I will need it more and more in the future. I am talking about automatic unsubscibing from feeds. Or feed expiration, if you will. Let me explain.

Continue reading Bloglines missing functionality