AppleTVNow I’ve actually watched the keynote (The crib notes were pretty amazing! But I stayed up way too late watching most of the Quicktime version of it last night.)

AppleTV

Apple also announced AppleTV yesterday. It’s a pretty cool little box at a sweet price point! AppleTV brings the Mac to the living room allowing you to view everything you can view in iTunes right on your television. Movies, music, tv shows, podcasts, album covers… if you can enjoy it in iTunes, AppleTV allows you to enjoy it on your television. It has all the appropriate audio and video ports to connect to HD televisions. You’ll also find USB and Ethernet ports on the back and wireless (802.11n) built in. AppleTV will synch with one Mac quite happily. Just like an iPod, you can select what actually is moved over to the AppleTV from your computer (Mac or PC running iTunes). But that’s not all! It will also stream from another 5 computers. (I believe you can only have 5 computers authorized to connect at a given time rather than having a lifetime cap of 5. When you need to stream from the 6th computer, I expect you’d be able to de-authorize one of the other computers.)

The price is right: $299. And if that USB port can be used to connect additional storage, the 40gb hard drive becomes less prohibitive. It starts shipping in February and you can order it now over at the Apple Store.

AppleTV is a cool toy. I personally don’t watch much on my television (well, on the Fop’s television because I don’t really want to claim ownership to that monstrosity) so AppleTV isn’t very valuable to me personally. I can see how the Fop would have use for it more. If we had one, I would load music onto it for parties and when I’m kicking around the first floor as well as play with looking at my zoo photographs on the big screen. (Yes, I’m a little vain that way.) And maybe I’ll get into watching more video in iTunes over the next year…

And then, the iPhone demo…

I want the iPhone even more now. A lot more. I had full-on fangirl moments while watching the iPhone demo. The most amazing part is not the rich browser, the full e-mail client, the iPod functionality or the widgets. The most amazing, astound, revolutionary part is the interface itself. Apple took out over 200 patents during the development of this phone. Go Apple.

Remember yesterday I said that I didn’t want to have to remember the complex key combo to make my smart phone convert into a waffle iron? I’m pretty sure the iPhone can make waffles with fewer than 3 clicks of buttons labeled with intuitive icons.

The iPhone interface is just… smart.

Navigation is so incredibly simple. Touch the buttons, scroll up and down with a quick drag of the finger, and if you get lost (or just tired of playing with the Weather widget) there’s a handy-dandy Home button to take you back to the main screen. Apple has built in a cool little elastic band effect. If you drag your finger up and off the touch-screen (i.e. run over the top margin of the touch-screen) while browsing, whatever is in the window (songs, messages in your inbox, a Google map) keeps scrolling as if you gave the list momentum with your finger drag. It’s Very Cool.

The zoom feature – it’s a 3.5 inch screen which is big but still quite tiny. If you’re surfing a complete web page (the NYT was the example), you can double-tap the screen to zoom in on any point. You can also use a “pinch” move (opening or closing your fingers against the touch-screen). This multi-touch functionality is at least one of the patents.

The iPhone is an Apple product and therefore the switch between portrait and landscape display is beautiful and automatic when you turn the phone. Go, go, go accelerometer! Other terribly smart things the iPhone does include: pausing your music when you get a call, switching off your speaker when your bring the phone to your ear, and sensing the ambient light so it can adjust the screen brightness appropriately to your environment. Pretty cool stuff though not individually revolutionary.

Cover Flow

Cover Flow is quite possibly the coolest new feature of the iPhone. Cover Flow sounds like a fairly mundane feature and for some reason makes me think of surfboards. The demo on the Apple web site doesn’t do it justice. When you’re in landscape mode you can go into Cover Flow and scroll through the cover art of all your music. Drag your finger to move left or right, click a cover to view it (the album and artist info appears below the image quite helpfully), click again to go into the track list, keep clicking to select and play a song. It’s beautiful (and somewhat mesmerizing) and the closest thing to 3-dimensional data interaction I’ve seen on a 2-dimensional screen on a consumer electronic. As well as surfboards, this feature reminds me very much of descriptions of interacting with data in science fiction. If only the covers were flowing holographically in space for us to manipulate with our hands instead of just our fingers on this amazing little device…

A new revolution, thanks Steve!

Steve Jobs spent over an hour of the keynote just on the iPhone demo. I think I could have watched him play with the iPhone for another hour. It’s an incredibly device. Just incredible. I was ready to buy an iPhone, before touching one myself, just a few minutes into the demo. What did it? It runs OS X. OS X. On. A. Phone.

What makes this phone revolutionary is the innovation and the whole package. This touch-screen is amazing. Taking the keypad off the phone is almost as cool as taking the floppy drive out of the computer. This is not just an iPod+Phone device. It’s a tiny little Mac for your pocket that happens to also make phone calls.

apple, appletv, iphone, macworld, os x, steve jobs, technology