I too love that little tip calculator and wish they all would do that. But I agree that it will never outweigh the food when choosing a restaurant.

But in software, people are known for being fanatical fans of an app or OS just because of the little nice details that make it feel like the thing is really paying attention to your needs and it’s easy to get stuff done. So I’m a big believer in paying attention to the small stuff.

I once had the idea for an uber-geek restaurant where the check would come with a little PDA showing the things you ordered and you could do a quick vote while you paid, rating the dishes that you had. Then the menu would rearrange itself daily based on what was popular. I was imagining reprinting the menu showing the items with their votes, like on digg.com. Kind of like Netflix goes to dinner. Hey, I did say uber-geek.