Natural language entry of events, tasks, and contacts

As noted in the inaugural post here, the iPhone has the potential to be a killer productivity tool, more so if it offers some sort of over the air sync (GSM or wi-fi, ideally both). Mobile versions of iCal and the address book make this particularly straightforward.

Here's something else I want, though, both in iCal and in the iPhone: natural language event or to-do entry, like in Google Calendar, 30 boxes, Stikkit et al. There are a couple of Quicksilver plug-ins to do this fairly easily in iCal on the Mac, but I really want this on my iPhone also. I envision a "New" button that I can get to from almost anywhere that pops open a text box where I enter, "Lunch with Dave 11:30 Friday at The Even Keel" or "Remember to pick up milk" or "Moby Dick moby@whale.com 508-555-1111" and then a couple of buttons below to [add] or [add to...] where clicking [add] drops the event/task/contact into a "default" calendar/category and [add to...] lets me choose a calendar/category. In both cases though, the machine parses that language and puts the data in the right fields. I'm seeing this in too many places on the net to doubt that it's very doable.

Make sense?

Why the iPhone Could save .Mac

The entire point of this stupid blog is that I want the 'rents (since Merlin calls us kids) on MacBreakWeekly to help me with this idea that's in my head that I haven't seen articulated elsewhere (but which very well may be out there and I'm just not google-clever enough to find).

Here's the idea, and this is the over the top no questions asked real live reason I absolutely unequivocally will be first up to cancel Sprint and line up for an iPhone: .Mac should sync iPhones and Macs in "(basically) real time".

I want my iCal calendars/to-do's as well as Address Book contacts to sync without plugging in. I pay for .Mac to get this feature working between multiple Macs. Is it not the most obvious of desires for this to work with my iPhone?

If I add an event or to-do or contact on the phone, I want it pushed back to .Mac (and thus all of my synced computers. And vice-versa. My assistant at the office or my wife at the house makes a change on our calendar. Voila! It's on my iPhone.

Isn't this how Blackberry's work, sort of? I realize this isn't fully hashed out. For example, do I go to my .Mac settings and tell it to send the data via the GSM network at each change, or does some sort of silent sync occur every 15/30/60 minutes. I don't really care how, but this seems like such a no-brainer good idea and "relatively" trivial development problem that I can't imagine it's not in the pipeline in Cupertino. .Mac is struggling. The iPhone most certainly will not. This unequivocally would commit me to the phone and to an ongoing paying relationship with .Mac.

Make sense?