December 02, 2004

Gadget Corner

Go Go G5!: This week the friendly UPS man came by and dropped off a Power Mac G5 (and a new flat-panel display!) to replace my geriatric old PowerBook G4 as my "work Mac".

Yikes! The new machine is low on the power curve by desktop-Mac standards (a dual-1.8 GHz), but it was able to build a completely-new-from-scratch copy of our app in less time than it usually takes me to rebuild an updated-from-yesterday's-changes copy on the PowerBook. It looks like the morning meditation time afforded me by the daily sync-and-rebuild ritual is about to sharply decrease ...

TrafficGauge: If I wasn't working at home, I'd perhaps join the crowd clamoring for one of these.

I don't want to be a finger-wagging Europhile here, but I can remember riding through Hamburg in my manager's BMW five years ago, watching as our progress through the city was reflected on a full-color, constantly updated in-dash moving map display. Information about traffic jams and slowdowns in our vicinity were broadcast to the car via RDS-TMC; the system decoded these broadcasts and pinpointed each traffic problem with an icon on the map.

The whole mapping/traffic system was factory-standard, built into the dash and integrated with the car's controls. Traffic info was free, invisibly piggybacking on FM radio signals.

In contrast, TrafficGauge is charging you $79.95 (plus $6.99 a month) for a chintzy gadget that looks no more sophisticated than a hand-held Blackjack game that you'd buy for $4.99 in the kids' toys aisle at the drugstore. For a region that supposedly prides itself on being the epicenter of car culture (nobody walks in LA!), why did it take us so long to come up with something so cheesy?

Posted by Kevin at December 2, 2004 10:07 AM