hello from the future- some reasonable predictions

every few years i come up with a reasonable idea that i actually see on the market a few years later. despite this, no one hires me for a couple hundred thousand dollars to think of this stuff. here are a few examples:

mp3's: sort of. you'd have to see me with a 386, sampling an entire song from cassette. what the hell, it was the future. i felt it was. but you coudln't fit more than one album onto a 300 mb (not gb) drive.

digital still cameras: i saw them coming when i got flatbed scanner. a few years later, i got a still camera that did 640x480x8bit color, ran on 2 aa's, and had a flash. it connected to the oldest of the three mouse ports, using the same kind of pc connector you see on pre-classic-nes atari game consoles. i did not think things like youtube would develop as quickly as they did.

digital whiteboards: you use them like any other whiteboard. then you press "print" or attach them to a computer. as usual, more popular than i would have guessed.

cpu chips that can be rewritten to match the architecture of other cpu's: probably almost worthless with all the virtualization going on, and may never be cost effective, but if you remember the power pc... anyway i was excited to see a chip like this on the cover of scientific american, since i thought it was just another silly idea i had.

and my next prediction is one you'll really appreciate: a browser feature. i predict that as graphics and browsing technology (such as svg graphics) become more of the standard, it will be easier to zoom in and out of pages. it will be so easy, that browsers will automatically zoom out enough that "fit page horizontally" will automatically prevent you from ever seeing one of these stupid horizontal scroll bars, but you will still be able to "view actual size" if you want.

this feature already exists for images that are too large to fit in the window. by default, it zooms out but on images just barely larger in size, it's not a good look. for entire websites, it will be better. it will not require any changes in html or css, it will be a change in the rendering engine that allows virtual sizes to be displayed, based on existing webpages. raster graphics such as photos will still be imperfect, but there will be fewer of them on websites, and more objects that scale.