Two-Thousand And Nineteen-Ninety-Five
April 18, 2005
The Japanese call an individual with a driver's license but no intent of owning or regularly driving a car a "paper driver". In the same vein, I've been a "paper wearable computing enthusiast" for some time. I've drawn out plans, made feature lists, and even went so far as starting a wiki for a community project.
Those plans were pretty big, as plans go. I wanted something always-on, always-connected, integrated with my cell, and able to log and play back video and audio if I felt it necessary. This is the sort of stuff that
companies with more brains and money than I'll ever have
fail at regularly. Like many of my unrealistic plans, I chased down some small subsets of the larger plan, and basically left the rest of it on the shelf. I've since started reading Cory Doctorow's
Eastern Standard Tribe, and wearables are again on my mind.
This time around, my sights are on a different feature set. I'm pretty convinced that I need a 12" Powerbook to replace my G4 Powermac and my 70's-T-Bird-sized Dell Inspiron. I'm really happy with OS X, Quicksilver, Fink, and the Mac Experience in general. I also realize that any attempt at similar usability on a wearable scale is bound to lead to disappointment. I obviously had to separate the scifi wishlist from the essential and beneficial features.
I ended up with a pretty simple set, and I'm now throwing it at the Interweb in hopes that some enterprising hacker either a) picks up the idea, runs with it, and gives me a prototype in thanks, or b) tells me that Acme's Wearable Sprocket XZ-1000 fits my specs exactly, and for only a couple dozen rupees. Without further bluster:
FEATURE-PACKED VERSION (Rev.A)Software:
- wiki
- GAIMlike chat client
- email (mutt!)
- audio notifications
- plaintext or tiny mobile phone web browser
Hardware:
- One-handed operation
- BT or USB cellphone modem attachment
- USB sync-to-mac for wiki and email
- 802.11?
- long, long battery life
Ideally, I could keep the OS and applications onboard in flash memory, and have either a memory card or thumb-drive for all the generated data (wiki, bookmarks, chat logs). If I had the PB out anyway, I could plug this storage medium in and just edit it directly. Even better, I could share the wiki storage over the wireless connection to whatever luggable I happened to be using.
One problem? Too many specs for me to cheaply and reliably integrate. When it comes to writing fiction, I can be quite the hatchet-man. I love to pour out twenty pages of my consciousness stream and cruelly chop it to ten in revisions. Spec-sheets are no exception to this rule, as I think "What can I do without?" The point of this thing is not to replace my laptop, or shrink my laptop into an eyescreen, and I think I can do without a lot.
NOT-SO-FEATURE-PACKED VERSION (Rev.B)
- Wiki
- Email
- No internet connection - none!
- Functions like a thumbdrive when plugged into the PB
- slick little script that tosses new mail onto the wearable and snatches outgoing to send immediately
This chopped down feature set is a result of me asking myself "What is the longest stretch of time I can expect to be apart from a computer with a net connection, if I will be carrying the PB everywhere?" The answer was "Given the abundance of gankable wifi - not very long." The wearable becomes my outboard brain and data organizer, with the added benefit of an email percolator with max lag of a couple hours. It'll be a very Palm III sort of feature set - squeezing something that was very small and powerful 8 years ago into an even more convenient package. Huh. How about that - my scifi dream organizer is just 10-year-old technology in a different box. I wonder how many idea men find out their
next big thing is just the
last big thing redux?