Wanted: Calendar Feature
PDAs have solved or simplified a lot of the problems I used to have before I started carrying around a backup brain. But there’s one type of reminder that they still can’t deal with: “do X under when Y happens”. E.g., “Return Paul’s book next time I see him” or “Look up Janice if I’m ever in London.”
It seems to me that it should be possible to implement this using keywords: you enter a reminder like “Return Paul’s book”, and possibly some keywords; then, when you schedule a new event like “Dinner with Paul”, the calendar can notice that “Paul” appears both in the event and the reminder, and pop up a list of reminders that might apply to this situation. You could then attach the reminder to the event as a note, schedule the reminder as a separate event (e.g., “Finish reading Paul’s book”, scheduled a few days before you’re due to meet him for dinner), or whatever.
Depending on how smart the software is and how deep its tentacles go, it might make smart inferences based on other cues. For instance, if you block off a long segment of time as vacation time, it might think that you’re likely to be traveling, in which case it might ask whether you’re going to London, in which case you should look up Janice.
Of course, this doesn’t just apply to calendars: if you have a reminder saying to ask Bob if you can borrow his bandsaw, then your phone should know about this, and remind you when you dial Bob’s number. So should the Bluetooth phone dialer on your PDA.
I bet a lot of the necessary work has already been done in the e-commerce world: this feature seems related to the problem of recommending items based on what a person has in her shopping cart, or has recently looked at.
September 23rd, 2008 at 4:34 pm
Given the idiotic suggestions I’ve often gotten from on-line sites, I’m skeptical of our ability to create something like you’re asking for.
On the other hand, maybe the sites I visit just have particularly low-rent idiotic versions of it.
On the gripping hand, maybe I’m just a Luddite who hates machines that think they’re smarter than I am. Especially when they are.
September 23rd, 2008 at 9:50 pm
Hm. It may just be you: I’ve had pretty good luck at Amazon and Pandora, as evidenced by the fact that I already have half of what they suggest.
September 24th, 2008 at 8:53 am
Seems to me that Amazon and Pandora are the ones who’ve had pretty good luck ;-).