Ever been to the gym? Good – now – replace that treadmill with a band-saw, the dumbbell with a hammer and the twenty-something gym instructor with a rugged sixty-something in plaid.

It’s a workshop club and your membership card give access to equipment too damn expensive to own and way too big to have anywhere to put.

The retired artisan-turned-instructor get to teach skills acquired through a lifetime. The craft gets to live for another day. And you get to turn your ideas into physical reality. For fun, profit and recreation.

Appreciate this idea? Follow @hpeikemo for even more inspiration and ideas.

Let’s make the Creative Commons of contracts.

If you consider yourself a creative there is a good chance you suck at contracts. If you are good at contracts you are a wise creative. And Creative Contracts enable everyone to be wise creatives.

Common Contracts are similar to Creative Commons in almost every way –full attribution here, Professor L. You mix and match ready made clauses to fit your project. Payment, deliveries, ownership, non disclosure and whatnot. Every clause is written in plain speak with full implications stated in clear. Then of course backed by the legal speak that lawyers like.

Common Contracts launch with a web service to construct your contract: Select jurisdiction, define every party, choose the appropriate clauses, and export a legal document ready to be signed. And bring peace of mind to big clients, small clients, agencies, subcontractors and freelancers alike.

Attribution is due to Mike Monteiro and Gabe Levine as well for bringing awareness to the prevalence of jurisdyslexia¹ in our industry. So good to know I’m not the only one. So many to cure.

Only thing left is to make it.

Left index finger to accelerate, thumb to brake. Steer with the index- and middle finger on your right hand. No more missing a non-tactile hit area as you may tap anywhere on the screen to perform the action in accordance with the finger you use.

When touch screens get advanced enough to detect individual fingers –and dare I say– distinguish different people, it creates a whole new paradigm in touch interaction; a whole lot of abuse, and plenty of novel applications.

All talk of Siri got me thinking.
What will happen when voice interaction with computers go mainstream.
Will our requests become blunt and commanding?
Could this afflict our interactions with our own kin as well?

What if we throw positive reinforcement into the mix:
Have devices respond quicker to polite requests.
Might subtile variations in response time –corresponding to the politeness of the request– condition our manners toward all?

With my phone –it is an iPhone– somewhere very near the bottom of the accessibility/importance chart, is the screen rotation lock. A feature you may need without warning and all of a sudden. Alas, it demands a home button double tap with a swipe and a tap, and another tap. Olympic medals are won with less complicated routines.

I suggest, and I do not know for sure how well this works before it is tried: Toggle the screen rotation lock with a firm double tap to the back of the device.¹

It should be feasible from motion sensor data alone, taking directionality of the force into account to discern back taps from screen taps. And should provide a control so ultra-accessible it may be performed in unison with the rotation of the device.

Any home-brew developers willing to test my thesis? Android? Let me hear what you think.

State of the Ideon as of 21. September 2011. Much borrowed, some stolen.

• Solve problems. Discover problems.
• Our work can have a huge impact – on people, and on the world.
• Asking for help is more important than having an idea.
• Prototype. Try. Iterate.
• Work with the client.
• Work with the target audience. Ask. Observe. Understand.
• Work with diversity, without silos.
• What we create live on. Adjust. Evolve. React.
• The idea must be realized for the problem to be solved.
• Good ideas come from everywhere. An idea is not better because it’s yours (but it feels that way.)
• The best ideas build on other ideas.

This is a short one. The iOS iPod music app should skip the skip buttons with audio books for tracks are often hour long and there is no way to return to where you were before the accidental skip save spending several minutes scanning back and forth to recover that lost position.

ALL NEW! Introducing a revolutionary new way to shop. Any purchase is made, processed and shipped to your home as simply as a TRIPLE CLICK.

It could have been simpler but the single click happens to be patented. This one is FREE! Now you too can provide your customers with a convenience SECOND TO ONE and that at no legal or licensing costs what so ever.¹

Buy now with a triple-click

Try it now AT NO EXPENSE and be permitted to an EXCLUSIVE tweet.

It is a fact that if you have a coin and I have a coin and we exchange coins then we have one coin each. If you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas it used to be true that each of us would have two ideas. Today it is more likely that we are both left with nothing and some lawyer gets two coins.²

I propose an unpatented movement. Refrain from patenting software ideas but publish them into the public domain where they stay patentable to none and more importantly –available for anyone to implement and improve.

Ideon open ideas is dedicated to liberate such ideas and a small contribution to the movement.³ All ideas herein are implicitly and explicitly unpatented. (By me at least.)

How may we further the unpatented movement? I’d love to hear your thoughts. Leave your comments or contact me @hpeikemo.

It is not their fault and I’m proposing the preposterous: For Apple to add a button.

The first digital cameras were painfully slow. Digital SLR’s were ready in an instant and made photography fun again. And when compact cameras were closing in on a decent speed; they were displaced by our smartphones and the roller coaster that is camera responsiveness hit another dull.

These days your camera is never ready when you are. Multifunction devices have to subdivide its limited resources and that makes for a lot of overhead; switch mode, launch app, initialize camera. And the train has long since left the station –so to speak.

Your smartphone needs dedicated hardware for camera operations, the photo sensor must be ready at all times¹. This inevitably leads to increased costs and likely to lowered battery performance –Not to speak of one more of the appalling buttons. But it is all worth it; facilitating a grab of the total compact camera market.

The new button will be context aware but always devoted to the camera. The iPhone volume-up button may go back to focus on just that; no more moonlighting as a shutter button (as per iOS 5²).

• When the camera app is inactive, a press on the new button will launch it.
• Every press captures a photo, even outside the camera app. As a remedy for the most fleeting of photo ops; you shoot instantly from the hip, and when the app is ready, you may review the results or continue to shoot assisted by the viewfinder.
• Press and hold the button momentarily to record video. The subsequent press stops recording.

The entire photo app ecosystem will benefit from this and what is more: Instagram becomes instant.

A minor maintenance release. The update fixes an issue on sites with custom z-indices. Reduced duration for visual effects (configurable in Safari). And I finally got around to give Footnotify a proper icon. Download and install to Google Chrome. Safari users may update in the extensions preference pane or download extension and double click the downloaded file to install.

Protecting your phone with a passcode is sensible and it is very inconvenient and I do not secure my devices for that reason. I know I should –and I would– if only we could pick what apps to protect. I’d require a passcode for Mail and for my notes app and keep most other apps unprotected. When someone nab my iPhone at least they may use the calculator.

A per-app based passcode lock is enabled in the settings. Apps would be protected by default and you may choose what apps to have accessible without passcode. Described in the context of an iOS device but the concept is applicable to any platform.

• When locked and the active app is protected, you are required to enter the passcode.
• You may bypass the passcode by going to the home screen.
• Entering the correct passcode once make all apps accessible until the lock is reinstated.
• When locked, protected apps are indicated with a badge on their icon.

Anchor-linked footnotes always disrupt your page position and consequently your flow when reading. Footnotify is a Browser Extension to display footnotes as a pop-over. All that without upsetting your point of reference. ¹ ← Go ahead, click the footnote!

Chrome: Click here and install Footnotify for Google Chrome.

Safari: Download the extension bundle. Double click the the downloaded file to install to Safari.

Footnotes on major sites like Wikipedia, Daring Fireball and Brooks Review are enhanced with this extension.

Appreciate the idea? Follow @hpeikemo for more inspiration and ideas.

Update: Johan (@kottkrig) created a Firefox port.

You sign in and you forget to click remember me and you think, oh well, better check that next time. But you never do.

Muscle memory is great and all that but it makes you go username-tab-password-enter before another thought ever enters your mind and the nuisance of the frequent sign in is sustained.

So I plead for every decent site to let us ask to be remembered at any time after sign in. Ideally somewhere near the Sign Out button.

Until now, proper footnotes have required bookmarklets or scripts embedded on individual pages. But with this new extension; beautiful footnotes are automatically enabled on any page where the footnote-markup is parseable.

Try before you install¹ ← Go ahead, click the footnote!

Install: Download the extension bundle. Double click the the downloaded file to install to Safari –and enjoy a better footnotes experience on many sites. ²

This early release is not thoroughly optimized. It’s not much worse than anything else out there but I would like to find a way to defer loading of jQuery and more until actual footnotes are detected on a page. Presently I have not found a way to conditionally inject scripts.

Find bugs? Let me know. If you’d like to port this extension to other browsers. Just do that; more details in this post.

Update: A Chrome Extension have been published.

Having a piece of information on the phone when you need it on the computer and vice versa is an increasingly recurring problem. And it becomes more prevalent the more devices you use. (I’m on four.) All sort of exotic gestures are developed to solve this. Palm/HP does touch-to-share. Google is experimenting with Deep Shot.

But why not do it simply. Most people are familiar with the clipboard metaphor and the infrastructure for a Cloud Clipboard is already¹ in place for some platforms.

Once you enable your devices to use Cloud Clipboard anything you copy to the cloud is available on all devices. That be snippets of text but also photos, videos, and anything the clipboard supports.

If cloud clipboard is released as an open protocol it becomes possible to copy/paste between Androids, iPhones, webOS, Mac OS X, Windows, and more. There will still be a need to transfer information to friends and devices outside of your private cloud. And for that we will need some sort of standardized handshake². Until then a private cloud clipboard solves 95% of the use cases.

What do you think? I’m not in the position to implement this but Apple is. And I would love to hear your comments and ideas.

You nailed it again John. This time on Footnotes¹. Just by forcing the eyes to move; footnotes distract when reading things. Gruber’s in page footnote links offer some alleviation but that still require you to scan back to where you left off just because the page position changes when you hit that back link. There’s no reason for this on our expensive computer screens. So what you sparked is this little idea to improve the John Gruber method. Click the footnotes to experience my simple proof of concept.

To try this elsewhere: Footnotify ← Drag this to your bookmarks bar. Click it once to activate Footnotify on the page you visit² and when you click a supported footnote it will will appear like on this page, click again to hide it, and you never lose track of where you left off.

This version is only tested on daringfireball.net so far³ –but hey– what else is there? Full source code at github. Make sure you tell people so it may be improved upon.

Update: This page is Footnotify-enabled by default. And you may have it too by loading this script on your site. Feel free to contact me @hpeikemo with questions and comments.

As you pick up the remote, the TV instantly becomes aware you are about to do something. An embedded accelerometer in the remote detect the motion and send a signal to the TV, compelling it to prepare for user input and react according to context:

• Wake the TV if in standby mode.
• Alert and prepare components making them more responsive once the user press a button.
• Reduce remote-control complexity by showing a context-menu on the screen as you pick up the remote.
• Use movement-characteristics to learn who is holding the remote and load choices and suggestions based on individual preferences.
• Gesture based interaction.