MakeUsersWant

Accurate self-assessment boosts success. Inflated or too-low confidence in your own abilities doesn't.

(Sorry I can't provide a source. I guess it's an article in Psychologie Heute in the last 10 years.)

Random access is the fastest good way to gauge people in an oral exam. My experience as an academic confirms this.

So what's the rigorous mathematical justification this trick works and doesn't produce inconsistencies?

The power law smells a bit like P(W) were itself some maximum-likelihood estimate.

Getting my masters in mathematics was a task as practical as a carpenter's job. I would actually use everything I learned in some way, for example trying to generalize it. Perhaps that approach could help you remember, too.

I really want an interface designed with usability in mind. Things like:

* No common task should require more than 3-4 keypresses you can easily remember. Arrow keys count. Corollary: navigate the menus with the number keys; shortcuts, ...

* Incremental search to look up contacts with (like emacs C-s)

* Operate without looking. In particular, there should be a way to get to "home" from an arbitrary state, options have a "return to default" key, all important menus stay the same, anything common/important can also be done by keyboard.

* Typing speed. With slow input, calendar functions etc are nearly useless. Unfortunately, the fastest solution, qwertz keyboards, still sell at a premium. Perhaps there is a way to optionally emulate a chorded keyboard on standard 12-key hardware? It should have some form of visual feedback enabled by default, like Apple's keyboard overview.

* Reliable Sync. Even with 348 contacts, 1000s of appointments, international characters. The point is reliably correct - everything I have had so far has messed up eventually.

* Todo list and calendar 2 taps/clicks away, such as for a shopping list

Besides, I'd like some gimmicks:

* Adjust lighting / color hue / contrast on images, cut them down to an image section. Cut videos to save space and improve art.

* Easy file sync, regardless of file format

* Track location over time and tag photos. Even if there is no GPS hardware, cell towers broadcast their ID (or location), and modern phones have an acceleration sensor.

* A 3-touch way to keep track of my money / time.

* Office to go

* Flashlight mode. Display lighting is usually bright enough to find the key hole, stuff I have dropped,...

I admit you asked about computationally intense applications, but this is what bothers me most about my gadgets.