It’s Time For DOS On Your Smartphones
by Ewan Spence
I’ve always joked that the best user interface for me and my mobile – given I’m a complete control freak for my computing devices, would look something like this…
But interfaces have moved on since those days, with icons, gui’s sliding fingers, predictive keyboards and so on. Or have they? Gina Trapani has pointed out over on Lifehacker the number of services that are using SMS messages to send commands directly to the system – in many cases returning the information to the handset in the same format.
And it strikes me that this is the perfect example of the evolving nature of connected applications. We’re now at the “Windows 95†level – where we have got the job of getting our smartphones online pretty much sorted (remember the headaches of Windows 3.1 and the TCP/IP stacks? Exactly). We’re starting to see services online start to use the Web Browser, or putting together their own client, but there is still a huge (sometimes undocumented) range of SMS commands you can send directly.
And then there’s Twitter.
And while I think mobile applications are nowhere near Windows XP/Vista/OS X levels, I don’t think we’ll ever ‘downgrade’ the use of SMS as a command line to the world. Not only is it just convenient, but it’s very human centric. By this I mean it’s not scary (like calling up .bash shell scary) to the regular user. And those regular users are people who are used to texting friends and asking “where the restaurant is†– a perfect scenario for texting Google Maps or Yellow Pages.
What we need now is some natural language parsing, so that regular sentences can be sent to our Web 2.0 apps. Rather than “D Here Restaurant†“I need to get from where I am now to Valvona and Corolla.â€
