Thing 16: A Bottle-brush for Drying Wineglasses

Washing wineglasses by hand is a pain, and there's no way around that. But drying wineglasses is a pain, and there IS a solution to that. Drying wineglasses is hard because you have to choose between forcing a tea-towel to the bottom of the glass to dry it, or leaving it out to air-dry for hours. This could be simply solved by a thing like a bottlebrush, with the brush made out of strips of tea-towel. It does fall into the dreaded "single-use tool" category, though, and I'm not sure there's any way around THAT either.

Thing 15: Better Android App Management

I use the Android Market and the Amazon App Store and various other random sources to get my Android apps, like most people. But it has a problem: there's absolutely no equivalency between the two for updating--whatever you download through Market will only update through Market, and likewise for Amazon. This wouldn't be a problem if both stores listed updates at the same time, but they don't. There's been a Tweetcaster Pro update listed in the Market for weeks now, with no parallel update in Amazon. The problem is particularly bad for paid apps, since you have a license for that app in one marketplace but not the other.

I don't know enough about the infrastructure behind the problem--on the developer or the marketplace side--to suggest a good solution. Any solution involving a universal app-license-clearinghouse runs afoul of Google's hands-off(ish) approach to the Android world. But it needs to be cleared up, or I suspect users will tend to choose a "home" marketplace from which they only go afield for something very specific and desirable.

Thing 14: Clearer Patient Flow in Medical Settings

I'm hoping my recent extensive involvement with medicine as a patient is drawing to a close, for now; but it has certainly made me think more about interaction and facility design in medicine than I had before.

I should say upfront that I had a very good experience, over all; in all of the inning and outing of hospitals and imaging labs and doctors' offices, everyone was very kind, helpful, and appropriate. It was apparently a tricky situation, which now (knock wood!) seems to be on the mend due to the diligence and knowledge of all the medical-type peeps involved. So kudos and thanks to them.

However. The institutions housing these medical-type peeps all seem to have different interaction models--some of them run everything out of registration, some seem to register only for admitting patients, some I haven't figured out yet--and at no time does anybody tell the patient: Here at this office we use Medical Interaction Model 2. This means that when you come here, you should always go to the registration office first, no matter what you're here for. I'm sure from the other side of the desk it's perfectly obvious what the patient should do, but particularly when you've encountered a wide variety of different interaction models in a short period of time, from the patient side it's bloody confusing.

So here's what I want from medical offices: Clarify what you want me to do! If I need to go to registration, then go up to the health center, then to the outpatient lab for the end goal of getting blood work done, don't tell me to come in and get my blood drawn unless you know I've done that at this location for a very similar reason before. On a simpler level, when you visit a doctor's office and you're ready to leave, sometimes you stop at the reception window on the way out (new appointment? other arrangements? pay copay?) and sometimes you don't. That moment of hesitation--where am I supposed to be, and what am I supposed to be doing?--seems minimal and tolerable, until you experience it and its nasty cousin (being in the wrong place or without the right paperwork) repeatedly.

One solution requires no added hardware at all, just a little more talking on the part of the nurse, or whoever the final point of contact is: ask if the patient has done this before, explain what the different steps are. Simple, but tiresome for the nurses over many repetitions. A more elegant solution for a hospital or medical campus that would take much longer to implement is some kind of hardware (phone app? museum-style personal guide device?) that knows what the end medical goal is and what the intermediate steps are. Less time is wasted going to the incorrect place, and patients feel less like they've been abandoned in the middle of a rabbit warren with no particular indication what the next step ought to be.

I'm not satisfied with either of these solutions--maybe in tandem they would be acceptable--but what I want to happen is clarified interaction flow in medical settings; the basic patient question "Where am I supposed to be next, and what do I need when I get there?" should be anticipated and provided for more thoughtfully.

Thing 13: Belongings Shelf in Medical Rooms

I've spent a lot of time the last few days in medical rooms of various sorts--ER rooms, imaging rooms, regular doctor's examination rooms. And one thing they never, ever have is a place for the patient to put their belongings: purse, shoes when you get weighed, clothes when they come off. So you keep them in your lap, put them on a chair or under a chair. It kinda sucks. And I'm sure it's inefficient--I've managed to keep all my bits, but what if you get transferred while unconscious? What if something on the floor trips medical personnel in an emergency?

So this is today's thing that should exist: A small shelf or cubby, specifically for patient belongings. There's enough wall space in pretty much every room I've seen that this shouldn't be a logistical problem. It should just happen.

Thing 12: A Friction-Block Thing with Topical Analgesic

The Bandaid Friction Block Stick is an awesome thing--I always have one in my purse, for when I realize my shoes aren't as comfortable as I thought. It does a nice job of preventing blisters, but only if you notice the rubbing fast enough. Even a little late, though, and whatever blistery soreness you acquired is there to stay.

So what I want this time around is: the Bandaid Friction Block PLUS topical analgesic. Keep blister from getting worse, and lock any blistery nagging it may have already achieved out of my brain.

Thing 11: A Nutrition-Tracking App with Flexible Values

I like data. You might have noticed. BRING ME ALL THE DATA! I keep a lot of data on myself, because I don't trust myself to notice changes; among other things, I use a nutrition-tracking Android app called Calorific. Which I love to pieces: I like its high-level approximation approach, which I think compares very favorably with the general frantically detail-obsessed approach taken by most nutrition-tracking apps. In Calorific, some foods are green (fruits, vegetables, whole grains), some are yellow (non-whole grains, fish, nuts), and some are red (beef, cheese, cake). Instead of entering what you actually ate, you enter its color and portion size--the app is set up to help you figure out what the portion size was and what color it was quite painlessly.

Two things I wish it did.

Thing eleven-A: I wish Calorific integrated MealSnap-type function; there's already a feature where you can save a picture of your meal. I don't understand why you'd do this in its current form (it just saves a picture of your food! who cares?)

Thing eleven-B: Calorific assumes your eating philosophy is sort of FDA-informed. That is, whole grains are always good in any quantity, fat is always bad--which isn't necessarily everyone's. If you're aiming at natural balance and variety (where anything unprocessed in small quantities is OK) or the Paleo thing (where carbs and dairy are minimized), this ain't necessarily so. So I want Calorific to be able to switch between eating philosophies, and change the color-categorization of foods accordingly.

In this case, "universe" is once again mispronounced--this time, though, it's as WorkSmart Labs. Come on guys, make this happen!

Thing 10: More Media with Funny Women

I saw Bridesmaids last night. It was as funny as I've heard. Since I'd never followed Saturday Night Live, I was pretty unfamiliar with Kristen Wiig. She's a talented physical and verbal comedienne, and I hope she gets as many opportunities as Tina Fey has recently. I hope this is the final nail in the coffin of the remarkable argument that women aren't funny. I hope we get more media about women where they act, recognizably, like people. Particularly where the friends act recognizably like friends--goofy, affectionate, and open.

This is a mainstream movie that passes the Bechdel test with flying colors: it's full of named female characters, who have conversations with each other, that aren't about men. There are problems with the movie, of course, from a gender-politics standpoint: it frames all of the women primarily by their relationship status, even if their relationship partners are all pretty much unshown. The main character, Annie, is also framed by the failure of her dream-business, but she's the only character with an explicit career; none of the other women mention working. It's notable that the one fat character's sexuality is shown as less vanilla and more transgressive than anybody else's. There are also problems with the movie from an entertainment standpoint--a couple of lines that feel like a poor fit for the character, the big gross-out scene that feels like it came from another movie, the completely unmotivated resolution of the romantic subplot.

But overall, IT'S FUNNY. Calling an unfriendly flight attendant "Stove" instead of "Steve" is gonna make me laugh for weeks. Its humor is a gentler variation on the squirm humor that's been so popular for a while now; instead of putting mortifyingly tone-deaf people in normal situations and watching the havoc unfold, it puts a slightly neurotic but mostly normal woman in stressful situations that aren't completely implausible, and watches her sweat. That's a lot easier to take.

It's a movie that mostly lets women be people in their own right--and funny people at that. MORE OF THAT, PLEASE.