random8

I’ve got two gripes with the iPad…

Actually my gripes aren’t really with the iPad but rather with the content organisation.

I’d really like to be able to annotate an eBook, and then have those annotations collated into some form of document… but also for them to be “just there” inline next to the relevant part of the book. I love Apple’s iBooks app.

I actually love the dictionary feature in it that I think it should be a total os-wide feature (service). I also think this annotations (context sensitive notes that are extractable) should also be an os-wide feature, and this brings me to the next point…

iPhone OS really needs some form of services feature… “ways in which users can extend their own operating system with plugins that developers (apple or not) write”. Dictionary and annotations would be perfect examples of this. They should definitely have a size restriction, though.

Back in the days of text-based IBM pc computer programs, we had a thing called Sidekick (really I was a Commodore 64 / Amiga boy, but we had a PC as well) which was a “resident” program… very small (coz back then we had hardly any RAM) which on a keyboard shortcut, would “spring to life” and when you’d finished using it, disappear.

We really need something like this. And I think these two features… dictionary and annotations… would be great in the Mac OS, too…