yish

I also climb in SF (Mission Cliffs) and try to go outdoors but not enough. Usually local though, Diablo, Mickey's Beach, Castle Rock, etc

First, a really good site to find available domain names is http://domai.nr/

They link to a bunch of registrars, but I do have the same question, which of those registrars are a reputable.

Actually this for me is an issue, I use email search all the time, primarily for when I travel and have to look up various confirmations codes, reservations, etc. I also email myself all the time with notes, links, etc. The only issue I am having is that 1) Gmail works quite well for me right now 2) I don't want to pay $4 a month for this 3) Another company with access to my email However, while the app is free I will definitely test it out especially appreciating Gabor's replies and comments here and elsewhere. If it's truly faster and also provides me effective offline access to the info I really need, well I would still have an issue paying $50 a year for it, but at least it would be a consideration.

Doesn't gmail already allow me to do much of this without having to trust another company with all my email content. Plus nothing to download as its a iphone optimized web app and nothing to pay in the future(unlike the proposed $3.99 monthly fee).

I don't believe any of these design once run on any platform frameworks will work without severe limitations, performance penalties. Maybe fine if you are implementing a relatively static app/site but then why not just implement a mobile webkit optimized page which all these newer phones support (if only blackberry added a webkit browser too)

I would much rather see effort made by google to provide two backends datastores. The existing (primarily) key based bigtable, as well as true relational database. Ideally they could even provide the relational DB service where users would need miniscule knowledge for basic DB administration (replication/backups) and simplified administration for sharding. Ideally if the there was a way for the records to be cross polinated, even better.

Like everything, its all about tradeoffs: upfront costs, ongoing costs vs profit, time, environmental impact, convenience and capacity. All the transportation systems we should invest in (and all of them are somewhat subsidized by the government) should be the ideal balance of these tradeoffs for that particular distance range.

I believe there is a sweet spot in travel distance where high speed trains are the optimal solution over cars in the smaller distance range and planes in the longer distance range. Few would think to travel from LA to NY on a train but when you are talking about LA to SF, it makes a lot of sense. Time and destination wise it's more convenient, the environmental impact is less, frees up plane capacity at LAX and SFO for long distance flights, ongoing costs are similar, and the only question remaining is do these benefits outweigh the very large upfront cost? Would love to see how much these costs compare (a new high speed train route vs a hypothetical new airport + enough planes to service the route)

I think the purpose of Dasher and the other input techniques mentioned is to be able to quickly enter text in constrained situations, whether its due to size restrictions of the device or due to limitations on the input vehicle (e.g. single finger, one handed, thumbs only, etc). I think in any of these situations, I would be more then happy to be able to enter input as fast as I could type on a standard keyboard.

Now if someone could invent a faster then keyboard text entry system that had a decent learning curve, I would be all in. I tried Dvorak and never was able to type faster then on Qwerty, plus it took way too long to adapt too

I definitely agree a language model is key to better input schemes beyond the current state of the art on mobiles .For instance RIM/TrueType, iPhone, T9 seem to only utilize a dictionary based solution as opposed to using a full fledged language model limiting their effectiveness.

That said, while I like the language model I just don't se this interface being extremely usable. I believe there is a new interface waiting to be invented that, with this language model technique, start to approach keyboard typing speeds. Swype seemed on the right track, especially by reducing the learning curve and leveraging a QWERTY model, but I hope that even better options develop. For now a slide-out keyboard on my iPhone would be good enough for me. The PalmPre may even convert me if it works as good as it looks.

Please...

This isn't really new as Apple has been using this technique on the iPod line for years. The mini, nano, and shuffles all appear to be made with this technique. Additionally, the biggest issue with using a single piece of aluminum for an iPhone body would be that the aluminum itself would block the RF signal for the GSM and Wi/Fi radios which is why the current iphone back is plastic as is the little corner area on the back of the iTouch.