i gave nokia's beta release of Lifeblog a spin today and here are some initial thoughts. this product is still in beta a 0.95, but seems pretty solid so far.
Lifeblog according the about box is "a PC and mobile phone software combination that intelligently and automatically keeps a diary of the multimedia item you collect on your phone, such as photos, videos, text messages, and mutlimedia messages," and seems that it will be packaged as an add-on to the Series 60 interface.
the idea is as you send or receive any of the items mentioned above, Lifeblog keeps a timeline organized by date, and allows you to add additional notes along the way. what i think it is, is a better way to organize multimedia than is currently presented on the Series 60 interface. this is a graphical view of your inbox, outbox, and any photos or videos you take that make it very easy to track back to items if you know the relative time they were performed or received, and it think it works, from that perspective, even if that is not the original goal.
it's analogous to how agendus is a far superior way to organize the Palm OS or the Symbian UIQ OS than ships with the respective native OSes.
With that in mind, here's what i'd like to see the roadmap for Lifeblog be:
1) make the UI object-oriented...not in the ParcPlace Smalltalk sense, but in the IBM OS/2 sense...great - i got to the pictures i took yesterday of the soccer game, but i can't "Send" from Lifeblog. anything i can do to an object in other parts of the Series 60 UI, allow me to do from the Lifeblog interface
2) Sync/Upload via Bluetooth
3) ability to add notes for that day
4) calendar widget integration...isn't this really just an extension of a calendar view?
5) upload to a server - i understand this isn't a moblogging tool, but it sure could be a cool one! i'd rather just have a safe place to store everything...hell, can i send it to my iDisk somehow? i wish.
that's it for now. i'll post more as i use this more. looks like a great start to a new way to thinking about organizing mobile media.
Posted by Steve at July 12, 2004 11:17 PM | TrackBack