My Wishlist for the iPhone

After a month of using the iPhone, I'm surprised about how well it's working for me. While everyone is waiting for V2, it's already pretty darn good. I have only four requests:

1. Ctrl-F in Safari: I want to be able to search inside a page that's displaying in Safari
2. Copy-paste: Emails into notes, contact info into emails, Safari into email, Safari into notes, and vice versa. (I've heard rumors this will actually be in a software update soon)
3. Emil search: Even if it only searches the last 50 received emails.
4. Headphone jack: Make it fit other headphones with thicker connectors.

I'm looking forward to a bright future where one day there might be Xobni for iPhone. A mobile application may be even more useful than the desktop one. Imagine you're on the go and can use Xobni's super-fast email search, and people profiles.

Faster chips? Or better software?

Craig Mundie, Microsoft's Chief Research and Strategy Officer in today's New York Times article "Faster Chips are Leaving Programmers in their Dust":

In the future, Mr. Mundie said, parallel software will take on tasks that make the computer increasingly act as an intelligent personal assistant.

“My machine overnight could process my in-box, analyze which ones were probably the most important, but it could go a step further,” he said. “It could interpret some of them, it could look at whether I’ve ever corresponded with these people, it could determine the semantic context, it could draft three possible replies. And when I came in in the morning, it would say, hey, I looked at these messages, these are the ones you probably care about, you probably want to do this for these guys, and just click yes and I’ll finish the appointment.”

We have the processing power to do this today, and do it on-the-fly, not overnight. What we need is better email software, not faster chips.

Processing power will clearly remain a problem for some time to come, but Mundie's example is one where the problem lies with building those "smart assistants", not adding chip horsepower.