Other good but obvious point goes to pop ups and one that I personally hate is the one described on the item 9: Drop down menus where the user needs to be very skillful in the arts of mouse maneuver.

5 little-known Gmail features you may not yet know about

1. "Archive and next" shortcut
2. Share mail searches with friends
3. Browser navigation and history
4. Bookmark emails
5. "Filter messages like this"

Google's new calculator is a fun diversion, with several undocumented new features. Here's a few. (Kottke has some more impractical uses. Please post more as you find them.)

- How long can you play a 30GB iPod without repeating a song? Answer: 18.2 days
- How much hard drive space does one hour of 128kbps MP3s consume? Answer: 56.25 megabytes
- How many seconds in a decade? Answer: 315,569,260
- 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit in Celsius? Answer: 37 degrees
- How many feet in a smoot? Answer: 5.58 (via Ryan)
- What's the answer to life, the universe and everything? Answer: 42
- What's the answer to life, the universe and everything multiplied by the speed of light divided by three teaspoons? Answer: 8.51523871 × 10¹⁴ m^-2 s^-1
- What's the speed of a Delorean going back in time? Answer: 47,600,819,200 m³ kg/s⁴ (via Cam)

An Open-Source Java Port To iPhone?

Posted by kdawson on Saturday November 10, @12:43PM
from the one-can-hope dept.

An anonymous reader writes "With the first anniversary of open-source Java coming up November 13, a Sun official believes the project could bear a fruit much sought-after in the Java community: a Java port to the Apple iPhone. Apple has not released a version of Java capable of running on the popular device. But Sun's Terrence Barr, technical evangelist for the Java mobile and embedded community, believes Apple's plans to release an SDK for iPhone in early 2008 may result in the open-source phoneME version of Java ME winding up on iPhone."

And today we're introducing a new toy we are calling Hot Trends. It's a new feature of Google Trends for sharing the the hottest current searches with you in very close to real time. What's on our collective mind as we search for information? What's interesting to people right now? Hot Trends will tell you. At a glance, you'll see the huge variety of topics capturing our attention, from current events to daily crossword puzzle clues to the latest celebrity gossip. Hot Trends is updated throughout the day, so check back often.

Hot Trends aren't the search terms people look for most often -- those are pretty predictable, like [weather] or [games] or perhaps [myspace]. Yes, [sex] too. Instead, the Hot Trends algorithm analyzes millions of searches to find those that are deviating the most relative to their past traffic. And the outcome is the Hot Trends list.

Why did Google, for example, recently decide to offer free 411 service? I haven't talked to people at Google, but it's pretty clear to me why. It's because of speech recognition. It has nothing to do with 411 service, it has to do with getting a database of voices, so they don't have to license speech technology from Nuance or someone else. They want their own data stream.

...

WN: So you think that (control of data) is actually more characteristic of web 2.0 than social networking or Ajax (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) interfaces?

O'Reilly: Absolutely. Anybody who thinks that this is about Ajax is completely missing the boat.

I do think building rich Internet applications is an important part of web 2.0. I don't want to dismiss it, because we are able to build richer application platforms today. But it's ultimately about network effects, and where do you build services that get better the more people use them? And it's also about the databases that get created as a result of those network effects.