Page address: http://ambrosiasw.com/utilities/itoner/
Description: Woke up to the alarm at 6:30 am. Got my son out of his crib, handed him to my wife. OJ + medication + forgot to take my multivitamin. Checked my email, Twitter, etc. Did a couple posts. Showered but didn't shave. Took care of my son while my wife went to the gym. He played on the floor a bit, we laughed and giggled together a lot. Good times. Then he got hungry so I fed him while watching Honey I Shrunk the Kids on cable. When my wife got home around 10am, I put him down for a nap, packed up my bag, and left for work. N train to Canal then a 5 minute walk to the office. Worked on some PHP for a couple of hours, making less progress than I would have liked. Caught a baby mouse in a drinking glass at the office. Went to get lunch with the gang. First and second choices no good, but ended up at an Italian bakery/deli on Mott. Turkey and provolone on a roll with mayo and lettuce, Pepsi, and potato chips (sour cream and onion). Gave leftover sandwich to the baby mouse, AKA "Feedy". Sat back down at my desk. Selected "iToner" from bookmarks list and waited. Error number NSURLErrorDomain:-1005.
In the Kottke/Hourihan household, much of the past 4 weeks has been spent determining which has the most sensitive built-in accelerometer: an iPhone, a Nintendo Wiimote, or our newborn son.
The iPhone was eliminated fairly quickly...the portrait-to-landscape flip is easy to circumvent if you do it slow enough or at an odd angle. The Wiimote might be the winner; it registers small, slow movements with ease, as when executing a drop shot in tennis or tapping in a putt in golf.
Newborns, however, are born with something called the Moro reflex. When infants feel themselves fall backwards, they startle and throw their arms out to the sides, as illustrated in this video. Even fast asleep they will do this, often waking up in the process. So while the Wiimote's accelerometer may be more sensitive, the psychological pressure exerted on the parent while lowering a sleeping baby slowly and smoothly enough so as not to wake them with the Moro reflex and thereby squandering 40 minutes of walking-the-baby-to-sleep time is beyond intense and so much greater than any stress one might feel serving for the match in tennis or getting that final strike in bowling.
John Gruber remarked on the lack of a clipboard on the iPhone and I found myself missing that feature this afternoon. Steven Johnson suggested a double-click of the Home button as a shortcut to the phone favorites screen to shorten initiation times for frequent calls. Both of these observations beg the question: how are new capabilities going to get added to the iPhone? A bunch of you are either interaction/interface designers or otherwise clever folks...how would you add a feature like a clipboard to the iPhone?
Here's where interaction on the iPhone stands right now. Pressing, holding, flipping physical buttons (home, power, silent, volume). Tapping buttons on the screen to active them. Tapping the screen to zoom in/out. Tap the screen with two fingers to zoom with Google Maps. Pinch and expand on screen to zoom in/out. Swipe screen to scroll up/down and side to side. Swipe screen to flip album covers in iPod mode. Touch and hold screen to bring up magnifying loupe and drag to move cursor. Flip unit to reorient screen from portrait to landscape and vice versa. Swipe message to delete. Swipe screen to unlock. There are probably more that I'm forgetting.
How do you add to that while keeping the interface intuitive, uncluttered (both the physical device and onscreen), and usable? Add a button to the device? Add buttons onscreen...a menu button perhaps? Double and triple pressing of physical buttons? New touchscreen gestures? Physical gestures like shaking the entire phone to left or right? Voice activated features? A combination of some/all of those?
My iPhone bubble abruptly popped this evening when I tried my Shure E3c earphones (the best pair of earphones I've ever owned and far superior to the Apple earbuds) with the iPhone and they didn't work. The ones that came with the iPhone work fine. On their site, Apple says:
iPhone has a standard 3.5-mm headphone jack, so it is compatible with most portable stereo headphones. Some stereo headphones may require an adapter (sold separately) to ensure proper fit.
The earbuds from a v3 iPod didn't work either. The E3c plug is 3.5 mm and the earphones are about 2 years old. Is anyone else having problems with their earphones? I don't understand why this is even an issue. Very irritating.
Update: Others are having similar problems with headphones not fitting. Looks like it's the plastic sheath around the plug that's the problem. (thx, sean)
Update: I cut away a bit of the E3c's sheath with my trusty Exacto knife and it now fits in the jack. I'd love to know the reason for recessing that plug so much...besides pure aethetics of course; it just seems like too much of a trade-off.
- I'm kind of amazed that this thing lives up to the expectations I had for it. It's an amazing device.
- To read RSS, just put a feed address into Safari and Apple redirects it through their iPhone feed reader. But it's very much of an a la carte thing, one feed at a time. What's needed is a proper newsreader with its own icon on home screen. Workarounds for now: Google Reader looks nice or you could make a collective feed that combines all the feeds you want to read on your iPhone and use that with the iPhone feed reader (Meg's idea).
- I skipped the index finger and am right into the two thumb typing. With the software correction, it's surprisingly easy. Or maybe I just have small lady thumbs.
- After fiddling with it for an hour, I know how to work the iPhone better than the Nokia I had for the past 2 years, even though the Nokia has far fewer capabilities.
- I could use the Google Maps app forever.
- When I go back to using my Macbook Pro, I want to fling stuff around the screen like on the iPhone. It's an addictive way to interface with information.
- Finding Nemo looked really nice on the widescreen display.
- You can pinch and expand with two thumbs instead of your thumb and index finger.
- The camera is not what you would call great, but it's as good as my old phone's, which is about all I want out of it. The lack of video is a bit of a bummer.
- I Twittered from on line at the AT&T store that the line was moving slowly because they were doing in-store credit checks and contract sign-ups, contrary to what everyone had been told by Apple beforehand. That was not the case. They were just being super careful with everything...each phone and the bag that it went into had a bar code on it and they were scanning everything and running phones from the back of the store one at a time. The staff was helpful and courteous and it was a very smooth transaction, all things considered. I was on line for 2 hours before the store opened and then another 2 hours waiting to get into the store.
- The alert options (ringtones, vibrate options, messaging alerts, etc.) aren't as fine-grained as I would like, but they'll do for now.
- I have not tried the internet stuff on anything but my home WiFi network, so I don't know about the EDGE network speed. Will try it out and about later.
- The Google Maps display shows the subway stops but not the full system map. Workaround: stick a JPG of the subway map in your iPhoto library and sync it up to the iPhone. Voila, zoomable, dragable NYC subway map.
- Wasn't it only a year or two ago that everyone was oohing and aahing over Jeff Han's touchscreen demos? And now there's a mass-produced device that does similar stuff that fits it your pocket. We're living in the future, folks...the iPhone is the hovercar we've all been waiting for.
Update:
- The iPhone is the first iPod with a speaker. Which means that in addition to using it as a speakerphone, you can listen to music, podcasts, YouTube videos, and movies without earphones. Which might seem a bit "eh", but won't once you have 15 people gathered around watching and listening to that funny bit from last night's Colbert Report. You know, the Social.
- I'm getting my mail right off my server with IMAP, so when it gets to the phone, it hasn't gone through Mail.app's junk filters...which basically means that mail on the iPhone is useless for me. In the near future, I'm going to set things up to route through GMail prior to the phone to near-eliminate the spam.
- Tried the EDGE network while I was out and about. Seemed pretty speedy to me, not noticeably slower than my WiFi at home...which may say more about Time Warner's cable modem speeds than EDGE.
- BTW, all of these first impressions are just that. You can't judge a device or an interface without using it day to day for awhile. I'm curious to see how I and others are still liking the phone in two weeks.
- Everytime I connect the iPhone to my computer, Aperture launches. Do not want.
Panic has released Coda, a new web development app for OS X. Panic co-founder Cabel Sasser describes it thusly:
We build websites by hand, with code, and we've long since dreamed of streamlining the experience, bringing together all of the tools that we needed into a single, elegant window. While you can certainly pair up your favorite text editor with Transmit today, and then maybe have Safari open for previews, and maybe use Terminal for running queries directly or a CSS editor for editing your style sheets, we dreamed of a place where all of that can happen in one place.
Ever since I switched to a Mac, I've been seeking a suitable replacement/upgrade for Homesite. I limped along unsatisfied with BBEdit and am finally getting into the groove with TextMate, but the inter-app switching -- especially between the editor, FTP client, and the terminal -- was really getting me down. John Gruber has a nice preview/review of Coda:
Each of Coda's components offers decidedly fewer features than the leading standalone apps dedicated to those tasks. (With the possible exception of the terminal - I mean, come on, it's a terminal.) This isn't a dirty secret, or the unfortunate downside of Coda only being a 1.0. Surely Coda will sprout many new features in the future, but it's never going to pursue any of these individual apps in terms of feature parity.
The appeal of Coda cannot be expressed solely by any comparison of features. The point is not what it does, but it how it feels to use it. The essential aspects of Coda aren't features in its components, but rather the connections between components.
Panic's implicit argument with Coda is that there are limits to the experience of using a collection of separate apps; that they can offer a better experience - at least in certain regards - by writing a meta app comprising separate components than they could even by writing their own entire suite of standalone web apps. Ignore, for the moment, the time and resource limitations of a small company such as Panic, and imagine a Panic text editor app, a Panic CSS editor app, a Panic web browser, a Panic file transfer/file browser app - add them all together and you'd wind up with more features, but you'd miss the entire point.
Panic co-founders Steven Frank and Cabel Sasser both weigh in on the launch. Has anyone given Coda a shot yet? How do you find it? I'm hoping to find some time later today to check it out and will attempt to report back.
Not sure why I'm surprised, but when Apple came up with the idea for their Apple Stores, they appoached the design of the stores like they would any other product: they built a prototype first:
"One of the best pieces of advice Mickey ever gave us was to go rent a warehouse and build a prototype of a store, and not, you know, just design it, go build 20 of them, then discover it didn't work," says Jobs. In other words, design it as you would a product. Apple Store Version 0.0 took shape in a warehouse near the Apple campus. "Ron and I had a store all designed," says Jobs, when they were stopped by an insight: The computer was evolving from a simple productivity tool to a "hub" for video, photography, music, information, and so forth. The sale, then, was less about the machine than what you could do with it. But looking at their store, they winced. The hardware was laid out by product category - in other words, by how the company was organized internally, not by how a customer might actually want to buy things. "We were like, 'Oh, God, we're screwed!'" says Jobs.
But they weren't screwed; they were in a mockup. "So we redesigned it," he says. "And it cost us, I don't know, six, nine months. But it was the right decision by a million miles." When the first store finally opened, in Tysons Corner, Va., only a quarter of it was about product. The rest was arranged around interests: along the right wall, photos, videos, kids; on the left, problems. A third area - the Genius Bar in the back - was Johnson's brainstorm.
Lots of other great stuff in the article as well. Sounds like the Apple Store is an underrated piece of Apple technology.
By now you've all heard about the iPhone and read 60 billion things about it, so I'll get straight to it. I've been tracking some of the best points from around the web and jotted down some thoughts of my own.
Caveat: Evaluating an interface, software or hardware, is difficult to do unless you have used it. An interface for something like a mobile phone is something you use on the time-scale of weeks and months, not minutes or hours. There are certain issues you can flag as potential problems, challenges, or triumphs after viewing demos, descriptions of functions, and the like, but until you're holding the thing in your hand and living with it day-to-day, you really can't say "this is going to work this way" or "I don't like the way that functions" with anything approaching absolute confidence. With that said:
- In his keynote announcing it, Steve Jobs said the killer app for the iPhone was voice. The thing is, many people you talk to who are are under 35 use their phones more and more for text and less and less for voice. Same thing for Treo and Blackberry aficionados. Does the text entry via the touchscreen work as well as text entry via a mini keyboard? The tactility of raised buttons provides a lot of feedback to the typer's fingers that a touchscreen does not. (Jason Fried said: "When you touch the [iPhone] it doesn't touch you back.") Can you type on it with your thumbs? What about if your thumbs are large? I know people who can text without looking at the keypad and/or Blackberry keyboard, that's out the window with the touchscreen. Can you dial with one hand?
The touchscreen text entry is the biggest issue with the iPhone. If it works well, the iPhone has a good shot at success, and if not, it's going to be very frustrating for those that rely on their mobile for text...and every potential customer of the iPhone is going to hear about that shortcoming and shy away.
- The price is pretty high. So was the price for the first iPod. And the Macintosh. Apple will approach this in a similar way to the iPod...start with a premium product at the high end and work their way down to shuffle-land. It isn't difficult to imagine an iPhone nano that just does voice, SMS, music, and a camera. (Or an iPhone shuffle...you press the call button and it randomly calls someone from the ten contacts the shuffle synched from your computer that morning.)
- I guess we know why iPod development has seemed a little sluggish lately. When the Zune came out two months ago, it was thought that maybe Apple was falling behind, coasting on the fumes of an aging product line, and not innovating in the portable music player space anymore. I think the iPhone puts this discussion on the back burner for now. And the Zune? The supposed iPod-killer's bullet ricocheted off of the iPhone's smooth buttonless interface and is heading back in the wrong direction. Rest in peace, my gentle brown friend.
- How long before the other iPods start working like the iPhone? I imagine a widescreen video iPod with touchscreen but without a phone, wifi, camera, etc. will be introduced at some point after the iPhone comes out in June. Without the need for the clickwheel, the shape of the video and nano iPods becomes much more flexible. If they can cram all the memory and electronics into a smaller space, the nano could be half its current height with a touchscreen.
- What's really kind of sad about the intensely exuberant reaction to the iPhone is that the situation with current mobile phones are so bad in the first place. It's not like we didn't see any of this coming or couldn't imagine the utility of the iPhone's features. Visual voicemail is a good idea, but the reason Nokia or Motorola didn't introduce it years ago is that the carriers (Sprint, Verizon, T-Mobile, etc.) don't want to support it despite its obvious utility and ease of implementation. (T-Mobile sends my Nokia phone a text message every time I get a voicemail...what could be simpler than sending the number along with it and shunting those messages to a special voicemail app on the phone to see a list of them? Listening to them out of sequence would be a bit harder, but doable. Blackberry announced they were doing this back in 2005.) Integrated Google Maps, email, and search makes obvious sense too. As for the touchscreen, we've all seen Jeff Han's work on multi-touch interaction, Minority Report, and Wacom's Cintiq, not to mention the mousepads on the MacBooks and the iPod's clickwheel. The Japanese are pretty unimpressed with the whole thing.
What *is* fantastic about the iPhone is the way that they've put it all together; features are great, but it's all about the implementation. Apple stripped out all the stuff you don't need and made everything you do need really simple and easy. (That's the way it appears anyway...see above caveat.)
- Regarding the above, a relevant passage from a Time magazine article on how the iPhone came about:
One reason there's limited innovation in cell phones generally is that the cell carriers have stiff guidelines that the manufacturers have to follow. They demand that all their handsets work the same way. "A lot of times, to be honest, there's some hubris, where they think they know better," Jobs says. "They dictate what's on the phone. That just wouldn't work for us, because we want to innovate. Unless we could do that, it wasn't worth doing." Jobs demanded special treatment from his phone service partner, Cingular, and he got it. He even forced Cingular to re-engineer its infrastructure to handle the iPhone's unique voicemail scheme. "They broke all their typical process rules to make it happen," says Tony Fadell, who heads Apple's iPod division. "They were infected by this product, and they were like, we've gotta do this!"
- From the video, it looks like it take four clicks (after unlocking the phone) to make a phone call. For everyday use, that seems excessive. I hope there's going to be some sort of speed dial mechanism...with my current phone, pressing "2" and then "send" calls my wife (which I can basically do without looking, BTW).
- I don't know what the state of the art is in voice recognition these days, but I'm a little surprised that's not an input option here. To call someone, you say their name (my current phone does this). To text someone, you speak the message and they get the text on their end. Speaking "Google Maps, sushi near 10003" would have the expected result.
- Or maybe drawing graffiti on the screen with your fingers and other gestural input methods? You could have different swipes and taps as a speed dial mechanism...swipe the screen from top left to bottom right and then tap in the lower right hand corner to call mom, that sort of thing. Or Morse code maybe? ;)
- The OS X included with the phone obviously isn't the version that's running on my Powerbook right now. John Gruber proves that footnotes are often more interesting than the referring text and offers this little tidbit:
That is to say the core operating system at the core of Mac OS X, the computer OS used in Macs, and "OS X", the embedded OS on the iPhone. More on this soon in a separate fireball, but do not be confused: Mac OS X and OS X are not the same thing, although they are most certainly siblings. The days of lazily referring to "Mac OS X" as "OS X" are now over.
Several people have speculated that the iPhone's version of OS X is actually a preview of what we'll be getting with Leopard, the next version of Mac OS X.
- Lance warns us of the dreaded version 1.0 hardware from Apple.
- My favorite thing about the iPhone is the Google Maps integration. I would use that at least 4-5 times a week.
- Will phone numbers and addresses detected on web pages in Safari be clickable? Click to dial a phone number, click to look up an address with Google Maps, that sort of thing. Update: There's a video online somewhere (anyone?) of a demo that shows a URL in an email and/or text message that's clickable. (thx, Deron)
- The resolution of the screen on the iPhone is 160 ppi. People who have seen it close up report that the screen is extremely crisp and clear. Apple displays have been higher than 72 ppi for quite awhile, now but not as high as 160. How soon can we expect 160 ppi on the MacBooks?
- Double the width of the iPhone and you've got the iTablet. 640x480, a bigger virtual keyboard to type on, etc. Just a thought.
- My friend Chris suggested that it should ship with a dock that hooks directly to a monitor. Attach a keyboard and mouse to the monitor and voila!, you've got the world's smallest portable computer.
- iPhone trademark dispute between Apple and Cisco: booorrrrr-ring.
- This is one of the biggest questions in the hardcore technology community: will Apple allow 3rd party development of widgets and apps for the iPhone? Right now it seems like they might not, but there's a lot of speculation in the absence of information going on. It sure would be nice if they did, but Apple doesn't have a good track record here. I bet the Dodgeball and Upcoming folks are looking at the integrated Google Maps and wishing they could integrate their apps in the same way. (And Flickr too!)
- Games! A no-brainer. Probably lots you can do with the motion sensors and proximity detectors, not to mention the touchscreen. Although the touchscreen does make it difficult to see and control the onscreen action at the same time. How would you play Pac-Man on the iPhone?
- Available in more than one color? Probably a few months after launch...or it could be right away.
- Parallels running on the iPhone was a joke, folks. Just pulling your ARM.
- Don't you think that maybe every company should fire their founders after a few years and then hire them back a few years later? I mean, how crazy is it that Apple birthed the Apple II and the Macintosh -- each a significant achievement that taken alone would have sealed Apple's reputation for innovation in the history of computing -- and then fired the guy that got them there, stumbled badly enough that they were heading for mediocrity and obscurity, and then brought Jobs back, who spurred a string of successes that has nearly overshadowed the company's earlier achievements: OS X, the iMac, the iBooks/PowerBooks/MacBooks, the iPod, iTMS, and now the iPhone. It's insane! Not to mention fun to watch. Perhaps Google should fire Larry and Sergey with the idea that they'll take them back in a few years when they're a little older, a little wiser, a little more seasoned in business, with a new perspective, and possessing an enormous amount of motivation to prove that their dismissal was a bad move.
- My favorite comment from the Digg thread about the model iPhone I made out of cardboard: "Nothing says you've never kissed a girl like toting around a paper iPhone."
- From the Time article, a quote from Steve Jobs about how Apple does business: "Everybody hates their phone and that's not a good thing. And there's an opportunity there."
- Interesting thoughts from Adam Baer in the wake of the iPhone announcement:
Apple has figured out a way to retain a hold on hearts and minds in a business previously based on bytes. I applaud its designs, I worry about its tactics and what they mean for the future of marketing and group think. A group that wants our devotion but doesn't need the press, doesn't want the press, can't keep the press off its backs, is a group that's more interested in mind control than in improving lives with its products.
- Some miscellaneous links: Watch the MacWorld keynote with the iPhone announcement. Fortune piece on how Apple kept the iPhone a secret for two years. David Pogue got an hour of hands-on time with the iPhone. The Digg post of the announcement got almost 20,000 diggs, more than 1,400 comments, and nearly crashed my browser when I went to look at it.
And that's enough, I think.
The iPhone runs on OS X, right? So theoretically, shouldn't you be able to run IE for Windows XP in Parallels?
Apple's new iPhone looks like a thing of beauty. Widescreen touch interface, no buttons, runs OS X, useful widgets, integrated email, Google Maps, Google/Yahoo search, visual voicemail (see who voicemail is from before you call), SMS, Wifi, etc. etc. Oh, and it plays music.
A lot of people are wondering just how big this thing is. Using the technical specs from apple.com, I grabbed some cardboard, scissors, and glue and made a scale model of the iPhone. Here it is:
My hands aren't that big (I can barely palm a basketball on a good day), but it still seems to fit pretty well. How does it stack up against similar devices?
Here's the iPhone vs. my current mobile phone, the Nokia 7610:
iPhone vs. a 5G iPod:
Thickness of the cardboard iPhone vs. the 5G iPod:
1G iPod shuffle, 3G iPod, 5G iPod and the iPhone:
iPhone vs. a TiVo remote and a Wii remote:
That's all the gadgets I could find on a couple of hours notice.
I also dug up something I wrote a couple of years ago in the gigantic text file I keep on my Powerbook of ideas for kottke.org posts. 99% of the stuff in that file is completely dunderheaded, but I have to say I hit close to the mark on this one:
true convergence of phone + mp3 player will happen when someone solves this user experience puzzle: physically not enough room for two optimized interfaces (one for calls, one for music) on same small device. possible solution: no buttons, replace with touch screen that covers the whole front with one-touch switching between modes...
Once we're able to get our hands on it and use the interface, the iPhone could turn out to be a disappointment, but they're heading in the right direction at least. More thoughts soon.
(Like this story? Digg it.)
Yesterday a weird smell descended on New York City, a miasma of natural gas odor. Today you might sense a low hum emanating from all over the Earth, localized in households whose inhabitants spend unhealthy portions of their paychecks on consumer electronics. Geeks the world over are vibrating in anticipation of Steve Jobs' keynote at MacWorld starting in, oh, 5 minutes. Since I too am slightly vibrating and won't be able to get anything done for the two-hour duration of his talk, I'll be following along here, sipping from MacRumors' live coverage. (Gizmodo, Engadget, and Twitter have coverage too.)
As an appetizer, here's a few of the less hysterical predictions for what Our Fearless Leader is going to provide us with today:
- MacWorld Expo 2007 Predictions from John Gruber at Daring Fireball.
- Jason Fried's Apple phone predicitons (I especially liked this one).
- Macalope's predicitons.
- Some thoughts from Steven Frank.
- Regarding MacWorld 2007 by Dan Benjamin.
Ok, here we go....
- BREAKING NEWS: Attendees still taking their seats!
- Started. Gizmodo is stumbling badly. Zero updates.
- Sales updates. Apple now sells more music than Amazon.
- The Zune has 2% market share, the iPod has 62%. What brown can do for you, apparently.
- Apple TV in September. Not an actual TV, but a device that hooks to a TV. Here's some specs: 802.11b/g/n, 40GB HD, 720p HD, component rca, usb2, ethernet, HDMI. Retails for $299. Shipping in Feb.
- New product: internet communicator, mobile phone, and widescreen ipod all in one. Steve is very excited about this one. Called the iPhone. No buttons. Multi-touch screen. (WHOA!) Runs OS X. Jobs: "Software on mobile phones is like baby-software." It does all the stuff that OS X does. Calendar, mail, movies, music, podcasts, etc. Turns off the display and sound when you bring it to your ear to talk. It's got an accelerometer (motion sensor) and a proximity sensor. 2 megapixel camera. Screen resolution is 160 ppi. Here's what it looks like (photos from Engadget):
- Free IMAP email from Yahoo for iPhone customers. (Shot over Google's bow.) And it's "push-IMAP"...works just like a Crackberry.
- The iPhone has a full copy of Safari. Just browse away.
- Apple's stock is up $2.68.
- Jobs just prank-called a Starbucks, attempted to order "4000 lattes to go".
- Google and Apple pushing hard to partner. "Merging without merging."
- Apple doing stuff with Yahoo too.
- Apple's stock now at +$4.51.
- iPhone ships in June in the US. $499 for 4 gig, $599 for 8 gig. Available only with Cingular as the carrier. (Can you unlock?) Can purchase either at Cingular or Apple stores. Have to sign up for a 2-year contract.
- RIM stock is down more than 8 points. RIM makes the Blackberry. Palm, Motorola, and Nokia are all down as well. (thx, eli)
- Apple is changing their name from "Apple Computer, Inc." to "Apple, Inc."
Merlin Mann recently wrote two posts about managing your music library using iTunes Smart Playlists. His suggestions for making music-only playlists (for those that have a lot of podcasts & audiobooks in their libraries) and the "sure you really like that?" playlist are especially helpful. One of my recent favorite Smart Playlists is helpful for discovering good stuff that I haven't listened to in awhile:
The Last Skipped bit is in there because while listening to this playlist, I found myself skipping stuff I didn't want to hear and that rule gets it out there so that it doesn't come up again. An item on my Smart Playlist wishlist is the ability to measure popularity acceleration (basically, something like "gimme the most played over the last week"), but there's no way (that I can find) to ask iTunes how many times a song has been played in the last x days.
Several more Smart Playlist suggestions are available at smartplaylists.com and Andy Budd.
Now that the Mac/Ubuntu switch story has made it around the horn and back again (thanks for the non-link, Slashdot!), I want to clarify slightly what I meant by my assertion that Apple should be worried about "two lifelong Mac fans switching away from Macs to PCs running Ubuntu Linux" and that "nerds are a small demographic, but they can also be the canary in the coal mine with stuff like this".
Mark and Cory's switching is not going to send large numbers of Mac users scurrying for Ubuntu, no matter how well respected they are in a small community. Two is not a trend. But it may cause people to briefly consider that 1) the Apple experience isn't all that it could be, and 2) if you want a potentially similar experience, there's a non-Microsoft option available to you. And once that seed is planted, well, you know where that metaphor is going. (I'm also aware of a few other people who are pondering the same shift independently of Mark and Cory.)
In the late 90s/early 00s, Apple got their act in gear with OS X and their iMacs, Powerbooks, G5s, and iBooks. People who cared deeply about their computing experience (you know, computer nerds) took notice of Apple's rededication to producing great products, switched to Macs, and thereafter the Macintosh gradually became a genuinely credible option for programmers, web builders, graphic designers, journalists, students, and grandmothers. Not cause and effect, but the so-called alpha geeks noticed something happening and reacted before everyone else did. So when you have two people who care deeply about their computer experience and who were dedicated Apple users for non-superficial reasons switch entirely away from Apple for equally non-superficial reasons, it may be wise for Apple and the rest of us to take notice that they did so and, more importantly, why.
Lest we forget, Steven Frank reminds us that for quite a few years (which period roughly coincides with Steve Jobs' absence from Apple), the Macintosh experience wasn't all it could have been. In the midst of those dark times, I made a post about how frustrated I was with the Macintosh.
I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
At my first web design job -- at a company that used to sell and service Macintosh computers -- they had Macs on all the desks. When I left a year and a half later, everyone had Dells running NT 4.0 instead; the difference in speed, stability, and price was not even close at that time. I didn't use another Mac until I bought an iBook after the second coming of Jobs and the advent of OS X.
BTW, that Mac sucks post has become something of a meme on Slashdot. It's been used to call out Java 1.4.2 fanatics, TI fanatics, SGI lava lamp fanatics, Apple laywers, Mac Mini hard drive performance, cat fanatics, Google fanatics, Amiga fanatics, Pittsburgh professors, Apple I fanatics, trolling losers, and so on.
Last week, I reported on a man using the video camera that Apple had set up to record the opening of their new store on 5th Ave in NYC to propose marriage to his girlfriend, one Uschi Lang.
I got an email from Uschi and she couldn't be happier to announce that she said yes to the proposal and that her fiancé James has made her "the happiest woman in the world". Congratulations, you two!
Update: I emailed Uschi and James for some more details and just got a response back. James had been meaning to propose for a few months -- he'd had "the talk" with her father over the holidays -- and was looking for a good opportunity. They were both in line for the 6pm opening of the Apple Store on Friday when James noticed the camera and a proposal idea that was "unique, timeless, and surprising" popped into his head.
At 4:30 am, he snuck out of bed without Uschi noticing it and headed back to the Apple Store. Based on the timing of the time-lapse video already posted on Apple's site, James stood with the signs for about 15 minutes (5 minutes per sign) to ensure that they were visible in the video.
A few days later, James set up a "romantic trail of candles" leading up to his G5, showed Uschi the video -- which she had not seen despite some coverage on the web -- and she of course said "yes".
Apple opened a new retail store last night on 5th Avenue here in New York City. Since 5pm yesterday evening, they've had a camera trained on the store to capture the first 24 hours of the festivities and are displaying the results in a time-lapse movie on the store's site. During the 5am segment of the movie, an enterprising Apple acolyte showed up and proposed to his girlfriend by holding up signs in front of the camera:
Does anyone know who this person is? Please email me if you do...I want to know how this turned out!
As it happens, this was the second marriage proposal at the opening...the eighth person in line proposed to his girlfriend right before the store opened and she said yes. Geek love!
Update: Uschi apparently said yes! (I say apparently because this blogspot site has the story and I'm assuming it was copied without attribution from a news site or newspaper but I can't find the actual source.) (thx, robert)
Update: My pal David thinks the acceptance is a hoax...that blogspot site is filled with other fake news stories. I was fished in!!
From: jason@kottke.org
Subject: Powerbook support
Date: January 10, 2006 4:55:31 PM ET
To: Apple Tech Support
Hello,
I purchased a new Powerbook three weeks ago. It was working fine until a few hours ago when you announced the new Intel-powered MacBook Pro at MacWorld and I started to cry. "Four to fives times faster," I sobbed, "a built-in iSight, and a brighter, wider screen."
My display, while not as bright or large as the new MacBook Pro display, illuminated my wet cheeks and red, swollen eyes as my tears rained down on the backlit keyboard. An acrid smell rose up from inside the smooth metal machine as my salty tears joined with the electronics, joyfully releasing the electrons from their assigned silicon pathways to freely arc into forbidden areas of the computer and elsewhere, including, somewhat painfully, my hands.
Is this covered under my warranty and if so, can you send me a new MacBook Pro as a replacement, please? Thank you for your time,
-jason
Going to try doing an live update of what Jobs is announcing at MacWorld. If you'd like to drink right from the firehose, here's the MacRumors feed. (Note, I'm not at MacWorld, so I have no idea why I'm doing this except it's kinda fun and old school in a way.)
- 32 million iPods sold in 2005
- Selling at the rate of a billion songs a year on iTunes Music Store
- Offering SNL skits through iTunes, all your old favorites
- Remote control for iPod with an FM tuner in it...listen to FM radio with the iPod
- 40% of the cars sold in the US in 2006 will have iPod integration
- Announced some new Dashboard widgets, including one for snow conditions for skiing
- 10.4.4
- Update to iLife....iLife '06
- New iPhoto will handle 250,000 photos (!!!), full-screen editing, more printing options (postcards calendars)
- Photocasting - podcasting for photos (Flickr competitor?), uploads photos to .Mac to iPhoto, people can subscribe, anyone can view photos via RSS
- Create video podcasts with iMovie, dump video to iPod
- iDVD creates widescreen DVDs, something called Magic iDVD that makes it super easy to create DVDs...drag and drop and push a couple buttons
- use iChat to record audio interviews with GarageBand (I think....), ah, ok, GarageBand has a Podcast Studio in it, use it to produce podcasts
- Announcing iWeb. Share photo albums, publish blogs, podcasting, Apple-designed templates. One-click publishing to .Mac. RSS, of course (lots of RSS stuff in iLife). A bit hard to see what this is exactly when you're not watching these demos in person. Also includes some sort of online media browser w/AJAX...works in any browser. "integrated with your music library", whatever that means.
- iWork '06.... (nothing really new here)
- Talking about new hardware. Intel update...looks like OS X on Intel is ready. New Mac today with Intel chip. It's the iMac. Ahead of schedule (Apple originally said mid-year).
- Intel iMac is 2 to 3 times faster than the G5, Tiger (10.4.4) is native on the Intel processor, all of Apple's apps are too.
- Microsoft will make new versions of office for the Mac for a minimum of 5 years
- New Intel iMacs shipping today. They will be doing Intel versions of all their hardware this calendar year.
- Famous Jobs' "one more thing"....MacBook Pro, Powerbook with Intel chip, 4-5 times faster than the G4 Powerbook, magnetic power adapter
Ok, all done. Check out Apple.com for all the new stuff. Apple's stock price is up 5 points (~6%) on today's news.
The WWDC keynote just ended (notes here) and the news is pretty big in Apple land: Apple is switching to Intel chips (press release). A few notes:
- As speculated here and on Slashdot, Intel will not be making PowerPC chips for Apple.
- Intel will be making x486 chips for Apple.
- For the last 5 years, every copy of OS X has been compiled on both PowerPC and Intel platforms. This apparently is the long-rumored Marklar project.
- Jobs says developing apps to run on Intel Macs is easy...there's a checkbox in the developer tools that "makes a cross-platform single binary". Demo of Mathematica running on an Intel Mac from a guy from Wolfram...it only took them two days [some sources are now saying two hours, not days] to port it to Intel.
- Running PowerPC-compiled programs on an Intel Mac will be handled through emulation. Gold star to John Gruber for guessing this one.
I'm sure there's more, but those are the important bits. And I know this is Steve Jobs talking to us here, but from where I'm sitting (across the country, reading paraphrase transcripts), the transition has been well prepared for by Apple for a number of years and looks like it will happen a lot more smoothly than all the over-the-weekend hand-wringing indicated that it would.
Update: Dave Winer is reporting that:
1. Apple is not going into the software business, their operating system will not run on other vendor's hardware. So you won't be running the Mac OS on Dell, HP or IBM, for example. and 2. While Windows is not explicitly supported, they won't do anything to prevent Windows from running on their hardware.
Update #2: From news.com:
After Jobs' presentation, Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller addressed the issue of running Windows on Macs, saying there are no plans to sell or support Windows on an Intel-based Mac. "That doesn't preclude someone from running it on a Mac. They probably will," he said. "We won't do anything to preclude that." However, Schiller said the company does not plan to let people run Mac OS X on other computer makers' hardware. "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac," he said.
I've been closely watching the rumors and now news of Apple's impending switch from chips manufactured by IBM to those manufactured by Intel. Reaction to the news has been mixed at best, with a number of people worried about 1) the enormous cost to Apple and OS X software developers in rewriting software for Intel's x68 chips, and 2) Apple losing out on future hardware sales when OS X can run on a $300 PC available at Wal-Mart.
However, it may be that people are reading too much into this news. From an anonymous poster at Slashdot:
The contract Apple has with IBM has a "Moto" contingency. There are extremely tough provisions in the contract that Apple insisted upon to prevent another Motorola scenario from happening. IBM had no problem with the provisions because they were positive the could beet [sic] the goals by two in half the time. IBM fucked up badly.
Apple now owns a large amount of PPC IP [intellectual property] and Intel will now be manufacturing and designing PPC chips.
Everyone's assuming that "switching to Intel chips" meant x86 chips (found in most common desktop computers), but what if they're going to be manufacturing the PowerPC chips (or almost-compatible ones) that OS X already runs on? There's a lot of reasons why this wouldn't happen (How would Intel get a production facility set up that quickly? Does Apple own the IP for the PPC chips? Etc.), but when you look at how Apple protects their hardware business, it's hard to imagine that they'd let any old cheap x86-based computer run OS X.
Even if Intel isn't going to be making PPC chips for Apple, they'll probably manufacture a modified version of an already produced chip that OS X will be refactored to run on so that the cheapo Wal-Mart PC can't run it. And if that fails, there's always DRM, which could be used by OS X to verify that it runs only on Intel chips sold in Apple hardware.
Anyway, we'll find out on Monday; Jobs is supposed to make the announcement at the Worldwide Developer Conference.
In the four years since its introduction, the iPod has proven to be a versatile little device. Despite a relatively closed architecture, hackers have found their way in. Content creators and software makers put information at your fingertips when you're on the go. Would-be designers have added to the fashionable stylings of the now-ubiquitous white ear buds. Hardware makers and enthusiasts have augmented the iPod with new add-on gadgets.
For fun, I've compiled a bunch of hacks, add-ons, accessories, and such. Here are 50 Things to Do with Your iPod (besides listen to music with those white earbuds).
Things may be a little slow around these parts today...I'm upgrading my laptop to Tiger. The actual install will probably only take around 30 minutes, but the messing about with all the new features might take the rest of the day.
I've also been switching a few things around on the site and will be doing a bit more of that in the next few days hopefully. If you find something that isn't working or looks a little weird (the font sizes were all messed up on the PC the other day), drop me a note.
Update: Still trying to upgrade. Looks like my hard drive has some issues that cannot be repaired. I may have to erase it. :( I'm cold and frightened and I need a hug. More later (hopefully).
Update #2: Yesterday I descended into hell, my friends. From what I can gather, there seems to be something physically wrong with my hard drive, yet not enough for it to actually stop working (yet). Disk Utilities couldn't do anything with it and neither could Disk Warrior. My struggles yesterday involved trying to create a disk image of my drive on another machine (via Firewire), erasing my drive in such a way that it cordons off the bad bits of the drive from future use, dumping that disk image back onto my machine, and then finally upgrading to Tiger. Unfortunately, some mysterious failure occurred and I didn't even make it through step 1. So who knows if Tiger will ever pounce its way onto my hard drive. It ain't looking good.
Apple's codename for the new version of OS X clearly inspired headline writers to dust off a few of their favorite cat expressions. Here's a sampling of actual headlines (thanks, Google News) about Tiger's release:
Apple Sets Tiger Free on Public
New Mac System 'Tiger' Roars
Apple's new Tiger springs into action
Apple lets Tiger OS out of cage
Apple unleashes Tiger in Taiwan
Apple's Tiger unleashed in San Francisco
Apple's Tiger earns its stripes
Longhorn on Tiger's tail
Apple unleashes Tiger
Apple users are likely to be on the prowl for Tiger
Apple takes Tiger by tail with free installation
'Tiger' roars into stores
Apple to let loose its sleek Tiger system, good at hunting down files
Apple Lets Tiger OS Out of Cage
Apple unleashes Tiger operating system
Apple's Core Supporters Roar Approval At Tiger
Apple aficionados grab Tiger X by the tail
Apple Unleashes Highly Anticipated 'Tiger'
Tiger roars onto the Mac mini
Apple's Mac OS 'Tiger' Ready to Pounce
Tiger is out of its cage.
Apple's powerful Tiger leaps to the forefront
Apple's Tiger stalks Windows market
Mac users will be happy to have a Tiger by the tail
Apple's "Tiger" aims to take a bite out of Microsoft
Apple's Tiger Leaps Out To Operating-system Fore
Apple's Tiger Begins To Prowl, Set for Release Friday
I'm somewhat disappointed I couldn't find a headline that depicted a battle between Tiger and Microsoft's Longhorn, something like "Apple's Tiger Slays Microsoft's Grazing Longhorn, Leaving Bloody Entrails Strewn All Over OS Marketplace". I mean, why even bother if you're not going to go completely over the top? Amateurs.
Bill Brown has uncovered some interesting Slashdot comments by an Apple employee about Spotlight and future Apple's future plans. (Ed note: it's unclear whether As Seen On TV (ASOT) is indeed an Apple employee, but even if he/she isn't, the thoughts are still interesting.) In this comment, ASOT talks about the future direction for Spotlight, Apple's new finder (not Finder, but it seems clear that as Spotlight matures, it will become the de-facto way people use OS X), specifically about speech-to-text capabilities:
Example: You're doing a multi-party teleconference. A recording is made of that teleconference (each angle), and separate audio tracks are recorded for each participant. In real time, your computer transcribes each voice track and stores it as ancillary content on the recording, content that Spotlight indexes for you. At any time, you can type "meeting in San Jose" into Spotlight, and it'll take you right to the angle and track on which your co-worker Laurent talked about next week's meeting in San Jose.
and "anything" relationships:
Take two files, any two files. Say it's a PDF representing an invoice and a Photoshop file representing a poster you designed. You drag the invoice over the Photoshop file and a marking menu appears, giving you the option of establishing a relationship between the two files. If you want you can annotate the relationship. If you don't, you don't have to. The computer will simply note that a relationship exists.
Now extend that idea. Instead of it being two files, it can be two ANYTHING. Drag a contact from Address Book to a Pages document; up pops a marking menu asking you if you want to establish a relationship. Or an song from iTunes to a picture of your girlfriend. Or your daughter's birth certificate to her birthday in iCal.
Sounds like there's more than a little Quicksilver and Spring in there. And then here, ASOT talks about adding GPS data into the mix:
What's next? We're going to find new ways of attaching automatic metadata. Here's one we've been talking about a lot: Your laptop has a GPS receiver in it. Tiny thing, about the size of a pencil eraser. At all times, your laptop knows where it is on the face of the Earth, accurate to about thirty feet.
Every file you create is tagged with three new, additional pieces of metadata: latitude, longitude and altitude. That's on top of the date and time data we already attach to every file.
Say you go on a business trip to Seattle. A year later, you can search your laptop for that e-mail you sent to your coworker Tom while you were in Seattle.
S/he also notes that "It's going to be a while before we start shipping GPS-enabled Powerbooks...but it's on the drawing board." And you thought that gestural control of applications with the Powerbook's accelerometer was fun.
I've been using the Saft plugin for Safari for a week now. I've barely scratched the surface of what it can do, but I'm finding it indispensable so far. At any one time, I typically have about four browser windows open with 10-15 tabs in each, so the auto-save and restore tabs feature is a life-saver and worth the $12 cost. Check out the site for more features.
Now, someone make something like this for Mail.app...just a few small features here and there would really make it a whole lot better.
The Apple Macintosh turns 21 years old today and as a birthday present, the long-lost video of its introduction by Steve Jobs has been posted to the web by TextLab on their weblog:
Fear not, faithful Mac believers. We have found it. We have found what seems to be the only copy of a public TV broadcast on that very day. It was recorded and preserved by Scott Knaster, the "legendary Mac hacker", as Amazon puts it. Scott kept the tape (a NTSC Betamax III longplay) for 21 years since he keeps everything. Andy Hertzfeld saw it when he wrote the story "The Times They Are A-Changin'" on folklore.org. From there we followed the hints, and that's how we found it.
We worked with Scott to convert it from NTSC to PAL, we've polished it, cleaned it, huged it and digitzed it. Here it is. It goes back to the people who've made the Macintosh, and to the world. The complete material of about 2 hours is returned to Scott, Andy and the folklore.org people, and this weblog will report the story of the "missing 1984 video" in detail. We'll release other clips in the coming days, so bookmark and check back.
That page is super slow right now, so I've compiled a few links to the video (QuickTime, 20.9 MB). Enjoy:
Torrent file (use this if at all possible)
Torrent file (use this if at all possible)
preinheimer.com
cm.math.uiuc.edu/~staffin/
urbanmainframe.com.nyud.net:8090
ad.hominem.org
kappesante.com
brooksnet.plus.com
bluehome.net
afsheenfamily.com
kottke.org
cluecoder.org/~bene/
publicvoidblog.de
php-schmiede.de
mac-software-updates.de
homepage.mac.com/sdomanske/
Thanks to Peter for the pointer.
A friend of mine has always maintained that if Apple had emerged from the 80s as the dominant PC company instead of Microsoft, Apple would be the 800-pound gorilla of the technology world and we'd all be grousing about Apple and MS would be playing up their position as David to their Goliath (much as Apple does now). But I don't think that ever would have happened because, as Steve Jobs explains in this interview with Business Week, Apple was not about sales and market share but products and innovation (emphasis mine):
I used to be the youngest guy in every meeting I was in, and now I'm usually the oldest. And the older I get, the more I'm convinced that motives make so much difference. HP's primary goal was to make great products. And our primary goal here is to make the world's best PCs -- not to be the biggest or the richest.
We have a second goal, which is to always make a profit -- both to make some money but also so we can keep making those great products. For a time, those goals got flipped at Apple, and that subtle change made all the difference. When I got back, we had to make it a product company again.
It took Apple (and Jobs) awhile to come to this realization and recognize it as a strength -- hindsight is 20/20 and it certainly helped that Apple just couldn't compete on price, the primary factor in how people choose consumer electronics -- but now that they've realized it, they're back on track. Apple is basically a luxury computer and software company, akin to Gucci, Bang & Olufsen, and Calphalon in their respective industries. They aim to produce well-designed innovative products, provide a high level of service, and charge a premium for it. Much has been made of Apple's paltry OS/hardware market share, but when you think about it, when a designer label can capture even 5% of a market that competes heavily on price, that's an impressive achievement.
It's only Wednesday, but we're gonna have some Friday-grade fun anyway. I found this iPod guilty pleasures article wherein folks confess the most embarrassing songs on their iPods. Britney, the Carpenters, New Kids on the Block, and Air Supply are all mentioned. I don't have it in front of me, but my iPod contains the likes of White Town (Your Woman), some post-Thriller Michael Jackson, White Zombie, Guns and Roses, and a bunch of trance that's probably pretty cheesy and non-credible. After reading the article, I'm gonna have to put some Ace of Base on there at some point as well. How about you? Any dirty little secrets on your smooth white machine?
Think Secret says Apple is introducing the new models of the standard iPod on Monday (contrary to an earlier announcement). More interesting is this little puzzler:
Apple will not announce the new models through a press event, though Think Secret has learned that the announcement will be delivered through an out-of-the-ordinary publicity medium.
An "out-of-the-ordinary publicity medium"? Said medium is either a weblog (a new Apple blog? one of the many iPod news sites? Engadget or Gizmodo?), skywriting, with chalk from the back of a bicycle, or a free concert in Central Park by Prince.
Update: Or perhaps the cover of Newsweek? Not sure how that's out of the ordinary. (thx Ryan)
Further update: Predictably, Gizmodo and Engadget both have the Newsweek cover as their top story. Can you tell which one of the gadget sites is which? (I've removed the logos from the screenshots...and this is a mostly rhetorical questions...I don't need your answers via email.) And while we're on the subject, based on the latest stats, how long before Nick moves all his Gawker properties over to porn? Fawker, Boinkette, and Jismodo anyone?
Interesting note on Dave Hyatt's site about Dashboard and the version of Safari that will ship with Tiger (Hyatt is the lead developer on Safari):
[The Dashboard widgets] are Web pages, plain and simple (with extra features thrown in for added measure). Apple's own web site says "build your own widgets using the JavaScript language", but that's sort of misleading. The widgets are HTML+CSS+JS. They are not some JS-only thing.
So Dashboard is perhaps a bit more like IE4's Active Desktop than Konfabulator (Konfab is pissed at Apple for ripping them off).
His post also hints a couple of times to WebCore changes to faciliate Dashboard features and the RSS/Atom features in Safari: "each widget is just a web page, and so you have the full power of WebKit behind each one... CSS2, DOM2, JS, HTML, XMLHttpRequest, Flash, Quicktime, Java, etc." and "fixes to WebCore to support Safari RSS and Dashboard". This is really quite exciting. RSS/Atom parsing will be built right into the OS. With Webcore, Dashboard, and Apache on OS X, the lines are blurring between apps and Web apps. Nothing new (hello, push), but it's nice to see action in this area.
Big announcement in the small world of Mac software developers: Karelia Software has sold the technology behind Watson, one of my favorite OS X apps, to an undisclosed "large company" *cough* Sun *cough*. This means Watson will cease to be distributed at the end of July and will cease being supported on October 5, 2004:
As part of the transition, Karelia is planning on having Watson reach its "end of life" on October 5, 2004. After this end-of-life date, Karelia will not be able to fully support and maintain Watson. (Between now and then, Watson will continue to be fully supported.) Hopefully, by that timeframe, the company will have announced a new product that Watson users should be able to migrate to.
Some Web sites that Watson connects to change frequently, so some modules (see below) tend to break frequently. This means that after the end-of-life date for Watson, some tools in Watson will no longer function. Many other tools, connecting to less volatile Web sites, may work for a long time after that date.
I use the movies feature all the time and it will probably cease operation a couple of months after the end-of-life date. But the FAQ offers hope; a new version built by said "large company" is in the works:
Having a large company create and distribute a Watson-like desktop application to access Web services was a great fit for the vision of Watson. Not only can their reincarnation of Watson function on multiple platforms, they will have the resources and clout to bring more and better content to the desktop. And of course, we've worked hard to ensure that the new program will function splendidly on Macs!
And so they are...here's a weblog entry detailing Project Alameda, a rather Watson-esque that does a bit of search, shopping (@ Amazon), and newsreading. Sun missed the whole Web browser thing, but it looks like they're going to give the microcontent browser a go. Very interesting.
After not having a computer monitor at home for the past year and a half -- I've been using the laptop screen instead, which has been a little sucky for doing design -- I went out and splurged on a 20" Apple Cinema Display. Jesus, what an amazing monitor; I concur completely with Justin's Apple display lust.
The first thing I did after getting the monitor hooked up was fire up kottke.org in Safari. At this point, I'd like to apologize to those of you who visit my site with a Mac and an Apple display (or a similarly bright and crisp display). Holy burning retinas! Seeing that yellow green color at the top of the site was like staring directly into the sun. When the page first loaded, I recoiled, fliched my head to one side, clenched my eyes shut, and threw my hand up in front of my face to prevent any permanent damage to my retina. My efforts may not have been quick enough...when I closed my eyes to go to sleep that night, a bright white bar bounded by a dotted line beneath pulsed on the inside of my eyelids, delaying my slumber for quite awhile.
So, apologies.
When Apple announced iLife '04 a couple of weeks ago, a common reaction was moaning over the price, which went from free to $49. Which is ridiculous...$49 is a steal for that bundle of software. After playing around with GarageBand this morning, I can report that GB alone is worth the price. I've never had this much fun with a piece of software before...I got my money's worth after 30 minutes.
(And I'd like to post the song I made -- the finest techno banjo tune (w/80s synth) ever!! -- but the vast extent of my musical talent is just too much for the world to experience in such a direct fashion. Alas.)
Apple's new OS X update, Panther, has been out for a few days now, and many are cooing over the Exposé feature which allows the user, with a single keystroke (and then some mouse motion & clicking or a few more keystrokes), to navigate to any open window they desire. I think it's a nice feature in theory but clunky in its implementation.
Apple also improved the Command-Tab switching between applications, pretty much mimicking the behavior of Windows by displaying in the middle of the screen a palette with the icons of all open applications which you can tab through until you can get to the one you want. Which is a godsend for an old Windows hand like me because in my experience, Cmd-Tab switching is the one of fastest ways to switch between open applications.
While some are saying that Apple unfairly ripped off the Cmd-Tab feature from an application called LiteSwitch X (Proteron is obviously ignoring that they ripped it off from Windows), I think they missed a chance to take Cmd-Tab to the next level while, at the same time, making Exposé truly useful.
Here's what I propose. Ditch the existing clunky Exposé behavior (perhaps except for the "Show Desktop" keystroke) in favor of a combined Cmd-Tab/Exposé behavior. Hitting Cmd-Tab would bring up a palette of all the open windows (not just applications) and would also Exposé all open windows. Continuing to hold down Cmd and hitting Tab would cycle through each icon in the palette (which would need to be smaller to not overpower the Exposéd windows) but would also highlight the corresponding Exposéd window. When you reach the window you need, you let go of the Cmd key and the window pops open. Click on the image to the right to see a full-size screenshot of how this would work (*roughly*). You could certainly augment that basic behavior with existing Exposé features like the ability to use the mouse to navigate to the window of choice or to quit an app by Cmd-Qing while the focus is on that app's window, but for the basic functionality that will be used 90% of the time, all you need is Cmd-Tab.
That's it. Two keys for fast, easy switching between open windows that combines the best of both the existing Cmd-Tab and Exposé approaches...no mousing, clicking, or switching keystrokes required. There are a number of potential problems with this approach (such as the icon palette partially obscuring the Exposéd windows, which really isn't that big of a deal because the minimized windows are essentially acting as icons and therefore don't need to be fully shown...plus the tiny windows all look the same anyway), but I believe the simplicity would more than make up for them.
Giles Turnbull wrote a fun piece for O'Reilly showcasing the Docks of some OS X users. This is my Dock (well, as of last week...the one on my new Powerbook looks a bit different now). What does yours look like? Post a screenshot to your site and paste a link (and description if you'd like) to it in the comments.
Well, Sippey's publishing stuff on Stating the Obvious again, offering up some possible next steps for Apple's iPod, including making it more like TiVo:
Imagine similar functionality on the iPod: when you sync your catalog with iTunes, the device uses iSync to fetch new content to insert into the iPod UI: headline news, sports scores, weather reports...as well as promotional content for the Music store, quick surveys, email program opt-ins, third party ads, etc. Give the user the ability to opt out of the marketing content, of course, but provide micro-incentives like Amazon.com's nickel-incentive trivia program towards song purchases at the Music Store.
Great idea and pretty much inevitable, but the suggestion of it makes me want to hop on a plane to SF and strangle the responsible party. I see ads when I pee. I pay to watch ads at the movie theatre. Most television programming is filler for advertising (which explains why most of TV sucks). Many magazines are mostly advertising. MTV is 100% advertising. The Post-It Notes on my desk are from Barclay's Capital. Clothing without prominent advertising printed on it is getting difficult to find. I am marketed to and advertised to everywhere I go. So now I'm supposed to sit through promotions -- while draining my battery, BTW -- each time I turn on my iPod?
Of course not...the user will have "the ability to opt out of the marketing content". Given that in the entire history of capitalism, this has happened very few times, I'm understandably more than a little cynical on that reassurance. I guess if anyone could pull off a good balance between the utility of such a system to the user (which could be considerable) and the annoyance factor, it would be Apple (or Google). But that's a pretty big if.
I'm an iPod owner. Owner. I own it. It's mine. It's not Apple's, BMG's, or Universal's. It's mine. I can put whatever I want on it, be it music or anything else that I can fit into its 15 gigabytes. As Cory found with his T-Mobile Sidekick, purchasing a device that relies on a service/interface/whatever that is controlled by someone else is not ownership. Such rented devices (TiVo springs to mind) can be extremely useful, but perhaps not so good in the long term (what happens when TiVo goes out of business?). If Apple is pushing me advertisements and marketing which I can't opt out of and are draining *my* battery while I look at them and taking up *my* hard drive space, is my iPod really mine or is it Apple's? Will there continue to be a market for hardware that the buyer completely owns or -- because it makes more money for the companies producing the hardware -- will everything I "own" in the future (telephone, DVD player, DVR, music player, cell phone, PDA, PC, refrigerator, television, washing machine, &c.) be dependant on a service for its continued operation?
So, when I fix it so I can control my TiVo via the web and buy an Apple iSight camera & point it at the television, I can watch Junkyard Wars and Family Guy at work via iChat AV, right?
Also, at next year's O'Reilly Etech conference, someone** will do something with iSight/iChat AV that will allow people attending one panel to tune into the other two concurrent panels (much like Hydra let people textally eavesdrop on concurrent panels last year). The really cool thing? The organizers of the conference won't have to do anything to make this happen, aside from providing the wireless network. No setting up a streaming, teleconferencing, blah-de-blah server, no renting of video cameras or microphones, no A/V people. Just give people a medium for communication & collaboration and they'll figure it out for themselves.
** Here's a suggestion: a presenter could mic him/herself, make the audio available over iChat AV, and make the presentation available on the web so that anyone who has iChat can follow along from anywhere in the conference area. Add in real-time stenography with Hydra and you can enjoy the conference entirely from the bar or one of the sofas in the lobby.
It figures. Just after the expiration of the one-year warranty, my iBook starts having problems (Apple hardware has a history of this apparently). The right speaker now cuts in and out, but more annoying is the ticking sound the computer started making last night. Well, it's not a tick exactly, more like a pop. A popping tick maybe. Hard to describe. Sounds like a tiny spark leaping across a tiny gap, waiting for its chance to become a big spark and hose my whole system. Or the platter on my hard drive skipping against something.
Weird...it just stopped. It's not ticking anymore. It ticked/popped for about two hours and then stopped. Did it know I was writing about this? Maybe my iBook is haunted. Do they do exorcisms at the Genius Bar?
Update: After sleeping for 30 minutes, the tick/pop is back. Is anyone else's iBook doing this?
Gareth Lloyd offers up an economic analysis of online music (mit graphs!) using consumer theory in How to make money from internet music (and make everybody better off in the process):
Moreover, I hope to show that despite our present gains, the internet retains great untapped potential. Apple's new iTunes Music Store is, I believe, an important precursor of what is to come. The strength of Apple's business plan lies in reducing search costs below those of the best file sharing software. If other record companies embrace internet distribution, they can do the same, and music listeners will gain access to a huge library of music. I will show that this gives a way for music companies to make money from the internet while simultaneously increasing the welfare and satisfaction of their customers.
The conclusion seems to be that music listeners have a very bright future. The only way that companies can succeed is to stop trying to exploit search costs and make their customers better off. In addition, a general reduction of search costs will lead to important secondary effects. By making it easy to search for new and better music, the internet will force companies to pay close attention to listeners and improve their products. They've long been able to make large profits on inferior products, but once listeners can find better music with minimum effort, the output of major record labels will have to improve in order to maintain market share.
That's a pretty hopeful view; it would be nice to see it come to pass, if only partially. I wonder if the music companies are doing any of this kind of analysis?
Now that people have had a couple of weeks to tinker with it, it's become apparent that in iTunes, Apple has created their own little Napster. Well, half of Napster anyway. Just like with Napster or Kazaa, users of iTunes can share their music libraries with anyone with anyone they want. Several public sites and applications have already sprung up to help people find folks who are sharing their music, most notably ShareiTunes and SpyMac.
The catch is that you can't save songs from someone else's library to your local library using iTunes. However, a few enterprising developers looked at how iTunes shares music and have been building applications that provide the other half of the Napster experience, the downloading of music from remote libraries. iLeech is a very simple, tiny program that lets you download music from any publically available iTunes library (and there are other apps that do similar things).
Conventional wisdom is that Apple seriously fucked up, the RIAA is going to sue Apple's pants off, and Apple's new iTunes Music Store will be shut down by the some seriously pissed off record companies.
I'd like to believe an alternative theory. Apple had to know what they were doing with iTunes. Their engineers aren't stupid. They left the whole thing wide open and had to know how trivial it would be for developers to figure out the protocol and write apps to download the music directly. Maybe Apple is taking a stand here, saying that this type of software is not illegal and that it is individual users who choose to break the law. Apple knows that it's in our nature to want to share music, photos, and movies with each other and is building applications (social software?) to support that behavior. Apple wants to make a business out of this and maybe they're daring the RIAA to sue them over it. Or daring the RIAA not to sue them. After all, Apple and the record companies are all buddy-buddy now with the iTunes Music Store...are they willing to sue Apple right after getting Jobs on the cover of Fortune with Sheryl Crow? If Apple is in fact taking a stand here, I say, go Apple!
So, I got myself one of Apple's new iPods. I only ever used an older-style iPod at the Apple Store a few times so I can't really compare the new with the old, but I love my new little friend so far. Size was an important issue for me (you may insert your own joke here) so I got the 15GB model instead of the slightly larger and heavier 30GB one. It's so small, thin, and light; it feels like it's barely there sometimes.
I'm using it during the morning & evening commutes and at lunch while reading. As someone who is not used to wearing headphones in public, the elimination of audio in the urban environment -- the rush of a cab through an intersection, the bustle of someone trying to get by you on a crowded sidewalk, the overheard snippets of an entertaining conversation -- is disorienting. I'm relying on my other senses -- particularly sight -- to keep aware and safe. So far, I like the music but miss the sounds of the city. Perhaps I'll give the iPod a rest 1 or 2 days each week.
Dave Hyatt, member of the Safari team at Apple and former contributer to Chimera, posted a bit on his weblog yesterday about integrating RSS reading into the web browser:
I've heard a lot of people state that RSS and news aggregators are for 'geeks' and 'blogging enthusiasts,' but I simply don't believe that to be true. It should be possible to make an application for managing a large amount of information flow that is accessible to mainstream users. Browsers are trying to make information easier to manage with smarter bookmarking systems and page management capabilities (tabs), and news readers are emerging that (in effect) push new information to you in as it's posted and allow you to switch rapidly between different information sets as well.
His comments and the ensuing thread mirror much of the discussion around the Sherfari idea (follow-up). I envy Dave...I think this would be a really fun project to work on for Apple.
Update: yet another post/thread on Dave's weblog re: Browser++. The ensuing thread is useful only if you like reading about what technically-inclined power users (about 0.0002% of the population) want out of a web browser. User-centered whuzzah?
In response to my post on building a better browser, several people argued for the Unix approach to software design: build apps that do one thing well.
Q: What is this one thing that a web browser should do well?
A not-so-good answer: Judging from the comments about my post, most experienced browser users & software developers would probably say that a web browser should download and display HTML documents quickly and accurately. In the same way that cameras are designed to transfer real-life scenes to film, that is technically correct and helpful to remember when it comes to implementation.
A better answer: Let's apply the Unix approach so that it makes sense from a user-centered design standpoint rather than at the application level**. Web browsers help people find and share information on the web. Sherfari was an attempt at envisioning a browser that does this better than the current crop of browsers by adding the capability to do a few things that people commonly use the web for. Some cried "bloat", but as long as application features and capabilities are useful and appropriate to an application's function (the "one thing"), there's no bloat.
The web offers so much information and so many opportunities that there is much room for the addition of features to improve the browsing experience without creating a bloated application. With their iLife apps, Apple has demonstrated the restraint and ingenuity necessary to build balanced applications that are powerful without being overwhelming. Let's see them apply that to their web browser.
** Here's what I mean by that. If you were building tools to help people to send and receive email, ham handedly applying the Unix approach solely from an application point of view might result in one app to receive mail (or perhaps two separate apps: one to get IMAP mail and one to POP it), another app to write mail, and yet another to send it. But from a user-centered perspective, one application to do all those things (and more) makes more sense.
After playing around with Apple's new Safari web browser for a bit, I am underwhelmed. To the many observations that others have made already (Mark Pilgrim, Matt Haughey, Ben & Mena Trott, Todd Dominey), I will add that the browsers I've seen in the past couple years have added little bits and pieces of useful innovation here and there (Mozilla's tabs, for instance), but none have the complete package of useful features, adherence to HTML & CSS standards, interface niceties, customizability, stability, and speed. Nice as proofs of concept, but none as complete as Netscape 1.1 was in its time.
Safari is still in beta so it might be unfair to criticize too much, but Apple missed an opportunity to innovate the browser in a truly useful way. A web browser is a tool for people to get information from the web. Much recent effort has gone into developing other interfaces through which to do just that. With Watson, Sherlock, and NetNewsWire, you "browse" the web for specific kinds of information with interfaces custom built for each task.
Why the distinction between regular web browsing and web browsing using specialized interfaces for structured data? Using Watson to find movie times is great, but it means having a separate application running...and for ticket purchases, it dumps me back into a web browser anyway. Apple's Sherlock app offers functionality similar to Watson. Why not merge Sherlock and Safari into one application? Whither Sherfari?
I've whipped up a few rough mockups to demonstrate how this would work.
Figure 1 (bigger) shows the current interface for Safari with the addition of an "Apps" button. Ideally this would be a permanent graphical button like the bookmarks button. The apps menu would contain a list of Sherfari applications like Flights, Stocks, Movies, etc.
Figure 2 (bigger) shows the Stocks application loaded into the browser window after being selected from the Apps menu. It works just like it would within Sherlock with a fast, customized interface for looking up stock quotes, viewing charts, and reading related headlines.
Figure 3 (bigger) shows NetNewsWire loaded into the browser window after being selected from the apps menu. Clicking on links in the NetNewsWire app would open those pages in new tabs in the browser. It would be worth the effort for Apple to allow developers to write their own Sherfari apps for tasks that use structured web data. NetNewsWire is an obvious candidate. Ben and Mena could write a app to allow people to post to & manage their Movable Type weblogs. Yahoo! could provide a maps app. How about an app from Amazon for browsing their store? (Watson has something like this.)
Figure 4 (bigger) shows how Safari's Google search box could be extended (a la Andre Torrez's Nutshell). The default search would be Google, but you could select other searches as well, either web searches or searches using the Sherfari apps. Selecting "Google News" and then doing a search would load the results page from Google News into the browser window. Selecting "Movies" would load the Movies app into the window with that movie selected.
This keeps all the activity commonly referred to as "web browsing" in one place. Assuming Apple would also add the capability for tabbed browsing, the Safari/Sherlock combo would be a powerful one. The generic web browser part would allow people to load up any old web page while the applications would allow them to quickly take care of frequent tasks through custom interfaces without the need to load potentially heavy or hard-to-use web pages.
Come on Apple, don't just give us another browser. Give us something that's so damn useful that we'll wonder how we ever did without it.
I'm not at MacWorld right now, but through the power of the web, email, and IM, I can tell you what's on the horizon for Apple:
- Safari, a new web browser for OS X. Beta available today from Apple.com.
- A PowerPoint-like app for OS X. (Keynote)
- iDVD is $50 (includes other 3 iApps). iPhoto, iTunes, and iMovie still available for free download.
- TiBook with 17" monitor. 17"?? Wow.
Information design hero Edward Tufte has some thoughts on Mac OS X:
"The OS X interface design is distracting and self-conscious, with a marketing slickness rather the straight-forward transparent charming style of the past. It is o
