Miscellany of a Cheshire Cat

For the second Saturday in a row I felt like crap and succeeded in not doing anything at all. I had a properly crappy day. Annoying to say the least. Well, I did successfully pack for my trip up to Connecticut. I was ready like a whole 24 hours before my flight. A new record, I believe. So now I’m in Connecticut, settled into my hotel for the week and stuff. I’m not all that excited about this trip for various non-work reasons, but it’s promising to be productive. I fly back home Thursday afternoon. As a side note, my new awesome bag of doom is not ideal for carrying two laptops. I’ll need to switch back to my backpack next trip. Or I need to buy a new MacBook Air. Air, baby, AIR. I think I’ll just swap to the backpack - much cheaper.

The Philly airport was about what I expected today - busy and populated by stupid people. The ID screeners have a new little tool - a blue light that confirms the legitimacy of your state photo ID. Kinda neat and faster than checking the other security features of most photo ID. The security line was long. There were a bunch of bag checks and carry-ons put back through the x-ray machine because apparently folks don’t understand that the signs pertain to them too. I don’t mind full flights or kids on the plane. I don’t even mind the fact that the plane ran half an hour late. It’s the stupidity that bugs me. Even when I’m prepared for it, get there early so the stupid people don’t make me stress about being late, and generally brace for the idiocy, stupid people can still be annoying.

Today’s oblivious moron award goes to the woman ahead of me in the security line who didn’t understand that everyone was taking off their shoes and coats because security had been announcing that we had to do that. The airport was not suddenly too hot when we arrived at the x-ray machine… No deafness to excuse her. She also didn’t seem to grasp that she needed to put all her liquids and gels in the quart-sized zip bag, not just the things that would have been in her toiletry case. The perfume, hand lotion and water bottle in her purse apparently slipped her mind. Hmm… because… when the security person asked you if you had any liquids or gels and if you had them all in your zip bag you forgot about the 32 oz bottle of water in your hideous faux lizard purse? See why she gets the oblivious moron award?

Airport security isn’t really all that secure, I know, but at least play along with them.

Speaking of the MacBook Air (because I can’t purely rant)… it looks awesome. I can’t wait to see it in person. So light, thin, tiny, cute… It’s not perfect, but it tries. *happy sigh* I don’t want one yet, but it’s a beautiful little package and will be my next laptop. Eventually. The desktop is next on the shopping list, but probably not for a while yet.

tags: airport security, airports, apple, macbook air, oblivious morons, travel, work

Now 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.

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

The keynote at Macworld went well - AAPL is up $7+ today.

Apple Computer, Inc. is now Apple, Inc. which seems both insignificant and significant all at the same time. Remember when Apple changed from a color logo to a monochrome logo? Today’s name change is far more subtle but means far more. By dropping “Computer” they are admitting that their roots no longer account for their core business. It’s been a long and nail-biting wait, but I think it’s almost safe to say that Apple may have a stable future. I’ve always said that Apple isn’t going anywhere but now I’m almost convinced of this myself! Of course, I’m also a Red Sox fan, so I still worry even when things are going well. I wonder if Apple, Inc. finally paid off Apple Records sufficiently such that there will be no additional lawsuits. The last I heard was that Apple Records would appeal the May 2006 decision in the UK courts but that was months ago.

So, about that phone…

The iPhone has been announced! Let’s start with the important information, the size!

• Dimensions: 4.5 x 2.4 x 0.46 inches
• Screen size: 3.5 inches (diagonal)
• Screen resolution: 320 by 480 at 160 ppi
• Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Battery life: 5 hours of talk/video/browsing time or 16 hours of audio playback

My 3.5 year old 3rd gen 40gb iPod is 4 x 2.5 x 0.75 inches (approximately). My fairly new LG flip phone is 3.5 x 1.8 x 0.75 inches. And neither of them are nearly as cool as this iPhone! Size does matter, at the iPhone is a little bigger than I usually like my cell phones to be, but useful functionality will make up for needing to buy a new case! It’s a touch bigger (less than half an inch taller, the first dimension listed above) than the current video iPods and but the iPhone’s screen is considerably larger (3.5 inch cinema vs 2.5 inch).

That battery life doesn’t suck either!

That little screen… my first laptop, a Powerbook 165, only had a screen resolution of 640×400. Of course it was 4-bit grayscale and only had 128K (yes K, that’s smaller than MB and much much smaller than GB) of video memory.

But back to the iPhone. Other important details for us Mac heads:

• The iPhone won’t be available until June. Yes, June. Steve Jobs may be a god, but he’s a bloody tease too.
• It will debut on the Cingular network only - there’s a multi-year exclusivity contract in place.
• You’ll be able to buy them from the Apple Store and Cingular.
• There will be 2 sizes available, an 8GB model for - $599 and a 4GB model - $499. Expensive and a little small but the new Samsung BlackJack is $449 and other PDA/smart phones currently on the market run from $400 to $650 even with less functionality. (Base prices, before discounts from contracts, etc.)

A Thneed’s a Fine-Something-That-All-People-Need!
It’s a phone! It’s a camera! It’s an iPod! It’s a browser! It’s a WIDGET MACHINE!

Were you actually interested in the functionality? Yes, it runs widgets and a slim version of Safari! It also supports POP3 and IMAP mail. There’s a 2.0 megapixel camera built in as well as WiFi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth 2.0, Edge and Quad-band GSM. I can’t wait to try one of these out. Maps, weather, e-mail, music, not to mention all the classic cell phone features, only smarter!

Everything is done via touch-screen, no pesky stylus required. But do not fear! The qwerty touchpad is predictive which basically means that it will figure out what you’re trying to say rather than inputting your typos. From the various demos availalbe on Apple’s site, it looks like the rest of the interface will be as intuitive and slick as we’ve come to expect from Apple.

I’m really not one to combine my toys. I have resisted the combined cell phone + (camera, music player, video player, browser) for a long time. Call me a luddite, but I’d rather have 2 devices that work really well and do exactly what I want them to do. I don’t want to need to remember the magic key combination to make my cell phone convert into a waffle iron at some critical moment. That said, I think the iPhone may be the combo device that does it all well. Apple’s amazingly talent for intuitive design will save the world. Well, may save my world at least! …if only we didn’t have to wait until June…

tags: apple, iphone, macintosh, macworld, steve jobs, technology