iPhone+GoogleMobileApp > NewtonOS

Depressing robots? Sign me up.

Wow, does this look interesting. I'm a big big big fan of both Solaris movies (no, haven't read the book yet), and Moon looks to be clearly inspired by the Solaris story.



Try not to notice the site's favicon, though. It makes me feel like I just met Steve Jobs or Sergei Brin, and while I was shaking his hand I noticed some poo on his shoe.

[Update: Apparently I need a wide-screen-video-friendly layout. View the non-circumcised video here.]

She's comin' down.

Sad, sad news. Again.

New Gmail and Google Calendar for Mobile

Today, Google rolled out a new interface for Gmail and Google Calendar. These are Google's first web application to use HTML5 and local databases, which allows for some "light" offline usage of your Gmail and Calendar information. In fact, as of 7pm-ish tonight, I beleive a bug exists (it kept poping up for me upon page refresh) that alerts you to this offline functionality.

As some of you know, I'm quite the Gmail fan. I ::gulp:: don't use a desktop email application anymore (more on that later!), with one "exception," which is MobileMail on my iPhone. For work email, that's probably going to remain the case... MobileMail is definitely faster than the web-based Zimbra interface for iPhone (nice try though, Zimbra!).

But, just after I was showing this new functionality off to a coworker this afternoon, I needed to email a friend with information based on an email I had just sent an hour prior, and hopped back to MobileMail (as I normally would) to do so. As I was moving back, back, forward, scrolling down, etc... I realized that if I were in the native Gmail interface, I wouldn't need to do any of this "extra" navigation between folders just to move within a conversation. The web interface proved itself much more efficient than the desktop app, once again.

Take a look at the difference:

MobileMail. Nice, clean.

And here the Gmail interface:

Oh, look, a search function!

Here's a conversation view:

 

Much more detail within a single window than the MobileMail interface. Now, yes, I'm a stickler for a good UI... but if the the tradeoff between good UI and speed is too great, I'm going to go for speed. And that's what's so impressive about the new Gmail/Calendar interface: the speed is nearly native... and this is just the beginning of what HTML5 is going to bring to handset devices with a decent rendering engine (read: WebKit), most notably iPhone and Android-based phones (note: the new apps supposedly share over 90% of their code between the iPhone and Android versions).

I'm also a big fan of the Floaty Bar: a button bar that hovers with you as you scroll through messages, and (get this) pops up and dynamically updates as you select items from your message list. *Very* impressive.

[Update 2009-04-08] Looks like Gruber's pretty impressed, too... which is surprising, 'cuz the guy's a picky mofo.

It really is that bad. Really.

Ok, this is pretty funny. Trent really really hated Chris Cornell's new album with Timbaland, and very noticably tweeted his feelings to the general public. Now, he's put the icing on it:

 
Be sure to put in your email address and "purchase" a copy. Totally worth it.