But, you know, this is 2010, right? And touchscreen devices with gestural interfaces are everywhere, so what are my options?

Simply: iPad plus the Adobe Ideas app. Ideas is a digital sketchbook, which allows you to sketch on a blank page or, more usefully, import photos and annotate them using your finger or a stylus. Combine this with screen capture on the iPad (home button + power button, if you didn’t know) and you have the ability to rapidly sketch out problems, suggestions and notes on your design.

Sharing your marked up screen shot is simple – you email from the app in pdf form. Of course, Ideas comes with blank page sketching so you can create wireframes, models and anything else in there too.

It’s also a great tool for photographers and art directors. For example, it allows you to easily mark a photograph with areas that need cloning out:

It’s this kind of functionality that makes the iPad such an endearing device. Once you’ve seen the ease with which you can both consume and create ideas using it, you realise how unacceptable the user experience with most devices is – and that it’s time for a new paradigm.

Thanks to Phill Howson for suggesting I write this post.

It’s kind of a cross between Ask Metafilter and Match.com – a recommendation service based on the system’s understanding of your personality/preferences and the choices that people similar to you have already made.

In 10 questions or less, Hunch will offer you a great solution to your problem, concern or dilemma, on hundreds of topics. Hunch’s answers are based on the collective knowledge of the entire Hunch community, narrowed down to people like you, or just enough like you that you might be mistaken for each other in a dark room. Hunch is designed so that every time it’s used, it learns something new. That means Hunch’s hunches are always getting better.

Caterina Fake was one of the founders of Flickr and the new service shares some of the converstational interface style of Flickr, which can be a bit annoying after a while. The system itself actually works quite well and seems to get better each time I visit as more people register and the system learns more. A lot of the questions are silly (‘Should I take a bath or shower?’), but there’s some good stuff in there too (‘Should I buy a Blu-Ray player?’ – no, apparently).