You’re on your way to pick up some fast food because you’re so amazingly hungry for a new quadruple-decker bacon angus cheeseburger. Your mind is just telling you to go out and get this new meat wad delight, which sits precariously between two deep-fried grilled cheese sandwiches. Hard to imagine, I know, since you’ve been using a mobile app to count your calories, but you’ve got a serious hankering (and no one needs to know about your caloric careen off course now anyway, right?).

However, instead of ordering at the counter or over the loud speaker at the local drive-thru window, you decide to check the “My Locations” folder on your mobile phone–or better yet, the iPad mounted to your dashboard. Once you come to a stop at the restaurant, an icon with the unmistakable red pigtails of a certain girl appears. You click on it. She starts talking to you by name and tells you what’s new on the menu. With a few swipes of your finger, you glance over the succulent selections and tap on the value meal that’s going to soon spark a conversation between you and your family physician (we’ll save the details of that encounter for another daydream).

At the end of your order, you’re asked to repeat their fast food slogan, or some other perfunctory gibberish thought up by the marketing hacks. This allows you to pass the voice recognition process, which instantly purchases the order using your pre-saved payment information. You feel so good about the experience that you somehow forget that a factually correct account of the caloric intake you’re about to consume was just instantly uploaded to a data-cloud. Guess you’ll come to terms with the slowly declining line graph that represents your ever-diminishing dietary goals the next time you’re faced with your personal apps at home.

For not only does the future mean that mobile applications will be served to you at the moment you need them without downloading apps or typing in web addresses (this was served to you when you came in proximity of the restaurant), it also means that your information will be sent to other applications and services uninterrupted by device or network specific barriers. Think of the possibilities of using the same premise at retail stores, hospitals, airports, or classrooms.

So, while you once downloaded applications to your mobile devices anticipating to use them with the world at large, the experiences of the future will most likely be finding you instead–and with that, changing the way you interact with the world.

In fact, this is all quite possible now and could certainly be used for more worthwhile things than ordering cheeseburgers.

Or maybe I’ve just got my head in the clouds.

In 1983 my grandfather suffered a debilitating stroke which rendered the left side of his entire body non-functioning for most purposes, including his brain. Because of his paralysis, he was robbed of speech for the remainder of his life, limited only to a few non-sensical words.

In his health my grandfather was a gifted musician who could play any instrument, from banjo, to drums, to piano–you name it. He operated in high command of his creative right brain for the better part of his time on earth. Part of the tragedy of his stroke was the thought of never seeing that side of him again.

Having visited him so often while he was in private care, I had witnessed many days when his inability to communicate clearly frustrated him, at the same time revealing his conscious sense of sadness. Then one quiet day, when my family got together for a special occasion, perhaps on his birthday, he gave us all a surprise. My aunt, who was also talented at the piano, decided to play a familiar song for my grandfather. And without hesitation, seemingly out from nowhere, he started to sing for us. In perfect clarity. Forming perfect words. Perfect melodies.

It was simply one of the most spiritual and at once scientific experiences I have ever encountered. It fascinates and inspires me beyond my own powers of articulation. One day we may come to understand the consciousness of being. Until then, we’ll slowly be informed by these tiny little awe-inspiring surprises.

…

And because it simply cannot be missed, here is Jill’s recent talk.

Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University showed people drawings of five tools (hammer, drill and the like) and five dwellings (castle, igloo …) and asked them to think about each object’s properties, uses and anything else that came to mind. Meanwhile, fMRI measured activity throughout each volunteer’s brain. As the scientists report this month in the journal PLoS One, the activity pattern evoked by each object was so distinctive that the computer could tell with 78 percent accuracy when someone was thinking about a hammer and not, say, pliers. CMU neuroscientist Marcel Just thinks they can improve the accuracy (which reached 94 percent for one person) if people hold still in the fMRI and keep their thoughts from drifting to, say, lunch.

As always, the results have to be replicated by independent labs before they can be accepted. But this is the first time any mind-reading technique has achieved such specificity. Remarkably, the activity patterns—from visual areas to movement area to regions that encode abstract ideas like the feudal associations of a castle—were eerily similar from one person to another. “This establishes, as never before, that there is a commonality in how different people’s brains represent the same object,” said CMU’s Tom Mitchell.

If what your brain does when it thinks about an igloo is almost identical to what mine does, that suggests the possibility of a universal mind-reading dictionary, in which brain-activity pattern x means thought y in most people. It is not clear if that will be true for things more complicated that pliers and igloos, however. “The more detailed the thought is, the more different these patterns get, because different people have different associations for an object or idea,” says Haynes. “We’re much closer to this than we were two years ago, but still far from a universal mind-reading machine.”

"Whenever there are other solutions popping up, it is a sign that there is a lot of change going on and that everyone needs to keep innovating to solve those problems," said Kevin Connor, Adobe’s director of digital imaging product management: "Apple is recognizing some of the same things that we are – there are some problems for photographers that are not fully solved yet."

It would appear then that Adobe views Apeture more as a competitor to Bridge, the workflow solution they’ve built into Adobe Creative Suite, and not Photoshop. If that’s really the case, then Adobe may have to add a few items to their white board before the next release (like those guys could ever call it day). While I like Bridge, or more accurately want to like Bridge, it seems to be missing in Apeture’s RAW sex appeal (pun intended). How I’ve been able to use Bridge thus far has really been a matter of practicality. As a creative repository or starting point, it’s a more obvious replacement for Extensis Porfolio than anything else. The added advantage of VersionCue, a CVS-like versioning layer that allows designers and artists to work more like developers, is a welcomed addition, but one I’ve only been able to use with mixed results. I can use it, and will continue to do so, but if a new alternative comes around that promises to be better, I’ll stop my thoughts at one and a half.

This wouldn’t be such a task for Adobe had they polished off their program just a tad bit better and marketed it a little more cleverly. I believe Bridge may be a great idea in the making, but I wonder how many artists who’ve purchased Adobe Creative Suite simply don’t know what it is or how to use it. That is a shame too, since there’s so much potential for use. Considering that it provides its own dialogue box, evening out some of the GUI difference between Mac and Windows, plus the fact that it delivers some of the most tightly integrated feature sets ever seen across programs, it’s pretty clear that Adobe really intended the Creative Suite to be a platform in itself, not just a bundle to justify pricing.

But even with all that, Adobe Bridge still doesn’t make me want to go out and buy a thousand dollar camera to use it. Apeture, on the other hand, does. Plus, it promises to do some of the things which have proven in Bridge to be somewhat kludgey.

I’ll reserve my judgment, though, until I get my hands on Apeture (and that thousand dollar camera). I might even wait for Bridge 2.0.

With a new baby still on the way and so much work left to be done, I have no idea why I made it a priority to install Mac OS 10.4 on my G4. I’m probably anticipating that the time for such pleasantries will quickly disappear. That being said, I’m glad I got it all over with because Tiger bitched and moaned about my hard drive pretty much all the way through. That is, until I decided to clone the entire thing onto another, much larger hard drive and upgrade it instead, which I had been meaning to do anyway. So it’s not like I was driving way out of the neighborhood.

Now I’m living large with the cat and, so far, I’m liking it a lot. But let’s be honest, there’s no need for me to dribble on about my own more-than-predictable reaction. Besides, the OS wars of yesteryear are so pedestrian.

Did I mention how much I like the new Dictionary?

Passionate discussions of Dreamweaver vs. GoLive, FreeHand vs. Illustrator, Flash vs. (no way, I won’t even make the comparison) … will emerge, but until the fuzziness of “integration” as the primary goal is sorted out by Adobe, Macromedia, and possibly US regulatory authorities, my other guess is that passionate disscussions will be the only thing we as consumers have to look forward to in the near future.

They got a lot to sort out.

And who knew back then that WordPress would become the de facto standard for anyone and everyone considering a migration from their old blogging software? But I guess as long as they (meaning the folks at WordPress) keep combining excellent software with free, we should expect to see a lot more of that mass exodus in the future.

In anticipation of that, at least now my site doesn’t look so much like yours.

If the demonstration of Automator doesn’t give an immediate boner to your inner geek region, might I suggest you take a little blue pill to help enhance your computing experience. Not too mention Spotlight or Dashboard. They’re looking pretty sexy as well.

Now, is this tiny little glimmer into Tiger quite as exciting as a preview to The Return of Darth Vader? Well, okay, no… that’s ridiculous.

But they do both wake up some interesting possibilities.

If you’re reading this, it means it worked.

For proof, take a gander at the unusually polished Steve Jobs in this interview. Notice how he cleverly drops in the use of the term “iPod marketplace” as opposed to the MP3 marketplace or digital music marketplace. This time, the distortion field is now becoming a part of the reality. So, get ready Alice and stop your whining.

Of course, this is not the Apple of yesteryear and why would anybody want it to be? Job’s has priced stuff to move, which means the Mac mini will likely not end up being a repeat of the failure that was the Cube. And it really looks like this time the legendary smart ass has his eye on the prize.

Yes, things are changing. But change doesn’t necessarily mean the sky is falling either.