My friend and former student John Jenkins alerted me to the following potentially embarrassing design flaw in the newest entry in the search engine wars. The challenger — Cuil (pronounced Cool), designed by former Google engineers and touted by them as a vastly superior search engine.
I’ll let John’s text from the email he sent me introduce the flaw:
First rule of creating an index of web pages to search: make sure to include your own web page.
I haven’t blogged much about my iPhone. (OK, lately I haven’t blogged much about anything…) But the latest firmware release (2.0) to my iPhone provides me an amazingly slick and valuable tool — screen capture of the iPhone’s display.
First of all, doing it is amazingly simple. You hold down the home button for a second and then press the off/lock button (on the top right of the iPhone). The picture of the display is saved in the photos. From there you can do whatever you can already do with pictures on the iPhone, such as email them.
So why would I use this? I can imagine a number of situations. An obvious one is simply any situation in which you’d like to show someone how cool your iPhone looks when it does whatever. Very useful for bloggers, educators and obnoxious Apple aficionados of every ilk.
Another involves the really helpful utilities on the iPhone, like the built-in Google maps feature. Imagine you are on the road while your friend is trying to figure out how to get to your lunch meeting location (in this case Nicolitalia Pizzeria in Provo, Utah — possibly the best authentic Italian pizza place in the valley). Imagine further that your friend is not cool enough to have an iPhone with the built-in Google maps feature. You go to Google maps on your iPhone, type in the search string “Nicolitalia pizzeria, provo, utah,” find a map of the place. You find that the built-in Google maps pin places Nick’s in the middle of University Parkway. No problem, you drop a second pin yourself and drag it right into the parking lot in front of the destination. You now snap a picture, and email it to him from your phone. Your friend is momentarily enlightened. Lunch goes off without a hitch. He will be more consistently enlightened when he springs for his own iPhone and when he becomes a regular at Nick’s.
The attached photo is my live demo of how this actually works. Yes, I did in fact email this to myself from my iPhone. Yes, that is in fact Nicolitalia Pizzeria. Yes, they do in fact have the best authentic Italian thin crust pizza in the valley. And now you have a map to get there…
If you see me there, say “Hi.” 🙂
A year and a half ago I tried to blog from the beach in Oahu using just my Treo and failed pitifully. Tonight I’m sitting in my lawn chair on the beach in Waldport, Oregon waiting for Independence Day fireworks to start. Not as spectacular a beach, to be sure, but my iPhone holds more technical promise than my Treo ever did so I’m drawn to make the attempt.
My wife just accosted me and has dictated the following message: “My husband is an addict who can’t put down his pathetic electronic toys even though we’re sitting on the coast in Oregon to watch fireworks over the ocean, for Pete’s sake!”
My brother-in-law wants me to add the phrase, “with his very cool brother-in-law” but I won’t stand for that kind of irresponsible reporting.
It’s time to try and post this. It’s getting colder and I think it’s not just the weather.