I have a question for our Android-using brethren who've had the opportunity to play with Now. I've read a bit about it over the past few weeks, and I've been excited about a port to iOS, but now that I have it, I'm not sure how or if it'll fit into my life day-to-day.
At first brush, all I see is a weather widget. I know there's more to it, but where exactly does the magic happen? What have you done (if anything) to maximize its value?
Make sure you have search history turned on in your Google account - that's when the magic happens.
Also, I'm not quite sure how the iOS experience will be compared to Android - on Android, Google Now can proactively push data to users via the ridiculously powerful notifications system, and the intents mechanism lets it hook into the other parts of the phone seamlessly. iOS' notification center is distinctly less advanced, and it obviously has no intents mechanism, so it may feel less "magical" than it does on Android, simply because it'll require more user proactivity to bridge that gap.
yeah, by the time I've remembered to open Google Now and slide up the cards I would very likely have realized what I might have forgotten.
For me, it's only showing the local weather, which I can see out my office window. And besides, this is CA. Forecast for the rest of the year is Sunny and warm.
I suspect that using the very simplified iOS notifications would probably get irritating quickly. Sample size of 1 but my iOS notifications tray is always a disaster compared to my Android, I think because it doesn't coalesce notifications the same way so you commonly have 5+ notifications for a single app.
On Android, it often kicks off notifications when things are relevant to your situation. For example, it learns where home & work are (based on where I spend time during day or night). When travel time back home at rush hour is bad, it sends a notification to say I might want to leave earlier.
If you put a location in a Google calendar item, it will keep tabs on traffic and notify you when you should leave for your appointment.
If your search history shows you're searching for a sports team often, it'll have a standing card with that team's scores & schedules.
Google Now is connected to your Gmail and can pop up notifications for shipments, flights, restaurant reservations, etc based on receipts and boarding passes in your inbox.
The "killer features" all come from you using other Google products/services while signed-in to the same account that you use with Google Now.
Search for "pizza" or a specific address on your computer while signed-in to Google Maps? The next time you look at your phone it tells you how long it would take to get there, and offers you turn-by-turn directions, automatically.
Have a flight confirmation email sent to your signed-in Gmail account? You'll be notified on your phone if your flight gets delayed, how long the trip will be, and information about your destination. Same goes for package delivery confirmation emails.
And those really only scratch the surface. The more you use it, the more you come to rely on it, which makes you want to use Google-branded services more and more often. It's a brilliant move on their part.
The magic happens in the best way. The idea is stuff only appears when it's useful and like "magic". For instance, when ever there is a bulls game it shows me who is playing with in the next day and the score when it's over. It'll tell me my time to get home or if I just googled a restaurant then it will tell me how long to get to the restaurant. I love it, but it's very subtle which is even better.
You will see more "magic" happen as you your the app. I don't know the state of app on ios but on Android, Google slowly learns about your home and office locations, it learns about stocks you search for, places you travel to, movies you search for etc. As a result of this,
- In mornings, I get the traffic to office from my home.
- In evenings, I see the travel time back.
- When I am visiting a different city/country, I get time, currency and weather updates. If the hotel reservation and flight reservation are in gmail, I also get the latest flight updates, the hotel checkin email etc.
- I have the stocks card always on.
- On fridays, I get updates on movies that are in theaters.
- On weekends and on trips, I get photos of nearby places (I click a lot of photos)
- I am not a sports fan but I have heard that the sports integration is decent and useful too.
Finally,
- I have not used the ios app so don't know if that has all the functionality as Android.
- I don't know if ios can have always-on apps or hardware shortcuts so I don't know if you can get to it with 0-taps and if it will keep the cards up to date in background.
The magic happens when I search for an address in Google Maps on my browser. When I get lost attempting to go to the address in my car, I can just slide down my notifications and Google Now has the address ready to go into navigation. This saves me time/anxiety of typing/getting more lost/voice recognition.
Things I use every day: weather; baseball and football scores for teams I like; approximate time to home and traffic conditions from wherever I am
Things I use when the appropriate email arrives in my inbox: current flight schedules (plus approximate time to get to the airport); package tracking
One thing that totally surprised me: I had a reservation on OpenTable, and my phone buzzed with a notification that it was time to leave for the restaurant if I intended to make it on time
And to be honest, I haven't "done" anything to get this value. This is all information that arrives automatically. That is, Google determined automatically what I needed to know by indexing my email, my searches, and knowing where I am at all times. Make of that what you will.
I don't drive or travel much. But the few times it has been insanely helpful is if you do travel and have no idea about places to visit / see while you are there.
It comes when you use GMail and Google Calendar a lot. Having it let me know that I need to jump on Muni to make a date on time is a plus. The most mind blowing was when I went home, told me I needed to leave for the airport because of traffic, pulled up my boarding pass (United), and showed me what gate the flight was and any potential delays.
It used to be an useless time to commute by car to home (and I used to take the train) and the weather thing. Until I went on vacation to Germany and it started popping places to see, German translating widgets and other goodness. Not that useful still, but I believe it can grow into something really useful and quick.
As it's been said before, that works just on some locations. For the vast majority of the world (like in, geographically), Google Now is not that accurate or useful.
Set a work and home location so that it knows when you really are out and about. Start using G+ if you don't already (eg I got a birthday alert for someone yesterday, via Now, via G+). Set some data in other google applications (Calendar, Finance, etc). All roads lead to Now. (Well, some do)
Imagine how useful intelligently feeding google reader data into Now would be... oh wait, whoops. Aside from whining about Reader being cancelled I am serious that sniffing relevant RSS feeds would be a highly useful feature to add.
I've had it for a few months on my Nexus 7. In summary its travel and shopping push notifications. I had the usual intense short lived "oh that's really cool" reaction and haven't used it since then and its had no measurable impact on my life. Kinda like my relationship with facebook and linkedin and twitter.
In the eternal wheel of IT, where nothing is ever really invented, merely recycled every couple years, this is the reincarnation of the pointcast internet screensaver app from the mid 90s. Back then the complaint was it was spammy and didn't provide real value, so after a similar intense publicity wave quieted, they dried up and blew away with the wind, until now (literally, "Now", get the pun? Yeah well bad pun; bad puns never really go away just get recycled later...)
I don't think it would be very useful to have RSS feeds in Google Now. I like Google Now because it tells me what I want to know right now, like that my flight is delayed or traffic is bad or here's how to get to that restaurant and you need to leave in 15 minutes. I don't want to know about a new article right now.
Perhaps. But the app has very little to say if you're not traveling or shopping. Personalized news would fit in with the "a push of personalized interesting stuff" model. On the other hand if its sticking to the "travel and shopping" model then I do agree news would be inappropriate.
You have cards for breaking news, and updates on stuff that you've searched Google News about (e.g. for the Boston bombing, I was getting regular updates on the situation. If you don't want to hear about it anymore, you can opt out easily.)
the magic of google now is that you don't have to do anything. most of the time it just sits there quietly doing nothing, every now and then it informs you of something useful.
it's not like other apps where you have to decide if it's worth it to use google now or not. all you have to do is install it, and it will periodically be useful.
The subject is an implied first person. (i.e., "I" or "we.")
I see this kind of omission as a way for cowards to avoid explicitly standing behind their request, both to diminish their own disappointment if the recipient says no or ignores them and to mitigate the chance that the recipient perceives their note as 'needy.'
Nailed it. It's a way to extend an invitation with minimal vulnerability.
I wouldn't agree that it's necessarily "for cowards," probably because I tend to employ similar strategies.
When I recognize it in communication from someone else, I understand where that person is coming from and consider the message delivered. It's kind of a fun game, striking that balance between nonchalance and making your intentions clear.
I was wondering about this construct several times in the past.
AFAIK English is not a pro-drop language, which means that the construct should be ungrammatical.
My impression was that it was introduced to American English be immigrants with pro-drop native languages (Italians? Slavs?) Am I completely off track?
Right, technically English doesn't let you drop pronouns. On the other hand there is a pretty long tradition of dropping first person pronouns in writing. You see it in informal correspondence and journals from before electronic media were omnipresent. Stuff like, "Went to the store today. Got stuck in a snow bank and had to call a tow truck."
I don't think it comes from immigrants that speak other languages, so much as economizing long passages of text that's all in the first person. The "I" at the beginning of every sentence just gets dropped.
It depends on whether you think "ungrammatical" means "not approved of by prescriptivists", or you mean "not used and/or not understood by fluent speakers".
Given that you know the word "pro-drop", I assume you know this, and I'm not sure if I should bother continuing in this vein. Maybe you're asking for a descriptive grammaticality judgement from fluent English speakers?
I agree that from a prescriptivist perspective, this is improper formal writing.
From a descriptivist perspective, I try to avoid biz guys, but I suspect the GP post nailed it, with respect to common usage in the appropriate sociolect (the same sociolect that has "proof points", "value-add", "circling back", etc). Although maybe not for the last sentence of an email that already had that much circumlocution.
Ungrammaticality changes over time. For a new grad emailing her boss, douchy pro-dropping in English is ungrammatical. Eventually, it sinks in as an acquired taste, and becomes grammatical.
"Pro-drop" languages usually incorporate the person in the verb. So "grab" in "we grab" is different than "I grab". In Greek, it's "πίνουμε" vs "πίνω". You omit the subject because you lose no information. In fact, it's redundant to include it, so you only do it if you want to emphasize it.
I think we (American English speakers) tend to drop pronouns in informal writing more than in speech. At least, thinking about how I'd say things, I might elide the pronoun almoooost to the point of dropping it, but it still "feels" like it's there, even if it didn't come out very much.
But "was thinking the other day, why don't we..." sounds fine to me in an email. wouldn't say it out loud, though...
the more spanish i speak the more i want to drop english words, and the more confortable i am moving the subject of the adjective to the end of the sentence.
Interesting. I always thought this form of writing was to cut down on the number of words in an email, so that the reader can more easily skim for the overall message, while also reducing formality and increasing familiarity. I've even recently tried to start emulating this style for those reasons.
If you said text messaging then I would agree. That's the first thing that came to mind because traditionally everyone wants to save characters when texting resulting in ur, b, etc.
Actually, with texting, I find it harder to shorten words into misspellings like ur or b, because I end up fighting against my phone's autocorrect. Sure, once you use it a few times, your phone will learn to stop autocorrecting, but why bother? I don't understand why people still use "ur" when "your" is just as easy to type these days. SMS length isn't really an issue anymore either, with most smartphones automatically concatenating longer messages for the recipient.
That is true, with smartphones this has changed (or should have go away). The issue isn't really about concatenating--I had nokia phones with just a keypad that did that years ago--it's the fact that often you can keep a message short and only use 1 message with the shorter "words". This won't make a difference if you have an unlimited text plan but it still matters for some people.
Though I agree that the tagline's a little confusing, the first two bullet points ("Never ask for a friend's Wi-Fi password again" and "Sync passwords between your tablet and phone") gave me a clearer understanding of what they're doing here.
Irrespective of the quality of their explanation, your cynical assumption (read: projection) that in comparing themselves to Dropbox they're just trying to "seem disruptive" or to put on airs is disheartening. I don't know these guys, but why not give them the benefit of the doubt? Couldn't they be comparing themselves to Dropbox for another reason – namely, that Dropbox is great at syncing, and that, just perhaps, their app is great at syncing too?
I really don't think the reply was particularly hostile. And I agree with it- "Dropbox for Wi-Fi" doesn't really make sense. I know why they've used it, but perhaps "Dropbox for Wi-Fi passwords" would be an improvement.
"Dropbox for Wi-Fi" just confuses me, because Dropbox already uses Wi-Fi.
Or just say "wifi password sync and share". I too had to think far too hard about the dropbox tagline, and the quip at the bottom about facebook. Came off far too tacky.
The idea though, instant classic, love it.
I just hope these things are features:
- I can easily see when a friend is trying to connect to my network and can grant access.
- I have to re-grant access after a password change. (no other way around the revoking access issue I can see)
Edit: Yes I have read their FAQ/Security section, I think it is incredibly stupid of them to act this way. I can see apps being built to show the password easily, I don't see why they think it will always require root (and that root is uncommon / hard to do), or why they think anyone gives a fuck about their ToS, or the "law" maybe its illegal for them to access data on their own phone in their country - others it is not.
The biggest concern I have on this issue that they are making people feel safer than they really are, people re-use passwords everywhere, friends are more than likely going to be the ones to check to see if your wifi password matches your facebook (and I'm more worried about that than some random war driver.)
(Frank here, one of the co-founders of CallingVault.)
'Privacy' in the context of our service means two things, but in the comparison to GV, it really means that we'll never scrape your texts or voicemails for ad targeting or use your activity to build a profile of who you are.
It also means – and we share this with GV – that you can keep your personal number private by giving out your CallingVault number instead.
Frank here – one of the co-founders of CallingVault. Here's how we look at it:
We wanted to charge the lowest price possible for a CallingVault line, so we made text and minute purchasing a la carte. This way, you get the line (including unlimited voicemail) for $3.25/month and you add only the texts and minutes that you need. We think our rates on texts and calls (as low as 1¢/txt and 2.2¢/min) are competitive.
We're always looking to get our prices as low as possible without jeopardizing the sustainability of our business (which means never showing ads, never selling customer data in any way, and ensuring that we can be around for the long haul to provide the kind of support we do now) and our goal is to be as transparent as possible (except with our customers' information). Can you point me to other services that charge less?
Flammable was invented precisely because people assumed "inflammable" meant its opposite. At some point, language consistency becomes less important than random fires being started accidentally.
