What if the iPad wasn’t really the new cool device. Maybe the reason the new Apple laptop release is so overdue (statistically) isn’t because of production ramp-up, but because they’re going to release a Mac with a touchscreen, thus the MacPad 
Archive for the ‘Human interface design’ Category
MacPad?
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010iPad aftermath
Saturday, January 30th, 2010TidBITS has a nice photo tour of the iPad launch, including pics of Xeni Jardin, Stephen Fry and some John Gruber amongst other Mac luminaries.
Daring Fireball and Stephen note that the iPad web page rendering is much faster than on the iPhone, presumably due to the A4 processor. I just want to know if it supports more than 8 pages open (which is the limit in the iPhone version of Safari).
Check out the above Stephen Fry link for his most excellent take on the iPad launch, including such gems as:
I’m not advocating dumb gullibility, but it is has always amused me that those who instinctively dislike Apple for being apparently cool, trendy, design fixated and so on are the ones who are actually so damned cool and so damned sensitive to stylistic nuance that they can’t bear to celebrate or recognise obvious class, beauty and desire. The fact is that Apple users like me are the uncoolest people on earth: we salivate, dribble, coo, sigh, grin and bubble with delight.
iTablet iPhone iThingy roundup
Wednesday, January 27th, 2010Aside from the usual random speculation about Steve Jobs worldchanging release in a few hours time, there have been a few interesting articles recently, namely
- AT&T may no longer be the exclusive iPhone carrier in the US
- Amazon changing their royalty structure to encourage vendors to price their books at US$9.99, either scared of the new device’s market, or colluding with Apple to provide content for it?
- Google releasing Google voice for the iPhone via a web page rather than as an App Apple would have to approve
- The question of which input method the device will use (will Apple extend the iPhones Voice Control crack the voice recognition problem?), and of course
- the invite to the launch event itself (colour e-ink anyone?)
- 20 things about the hyped iPhone/iTablet/iSlate
- Doonesbury are devoting a week of strips to the launch
- Will this have anything to do with Apple hiring the Yale head of business school to start the Apple University
- Or AMD’s refresh of its low cost processors
- Apple’s stock price currently at US$215.59, up from around US$83 a year ago. Soon to come crashing down after the hype singularity of the launch as analysts realise that even the second coming of the Jesus phone can’t live up to everyone’s expectations. (Hint – follow the old Apple employee’s maxim of ’sell before the keynote’)
I also wonder what the cool feature will be… Mesh networking? Biofeedback? Merging with other nearby devices to form a larger device? Inbuilt projector?
It will also be interesting to see if Apple launches any updates to their 17 inch MacBook Pro as they would probably always have done if they were attending MacWorld this year. Also, I predict an iPhone software update, an iTunes update and a Mac OS X update.
Now, lets sit back and see how wrong we all are…
Apple’s iPhone App Wall
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009TechCrunch has some photos of the very cool iPhone App Wall at WWDC. Every time you buy an App an angel gets its wings (or at least, its icon bounces).
iPhone 3GS
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009From WWDC:
40 million iPhones + iPod Touches have already been sold, 1 Billion apps downloaded in 9 months.
iPhone 3GS – S=Speed, some 2-3x faster, looks like it has the same form factor.
- Supports OpenGL|ES 2.0 and 7.2Mbps HSPDA
- 3 megapixel autofocus camera, tap to tell it where to focus, Macro mode to 10cm, better low light sensitivity
- Also captures video! 30fps, VGA with audio, auto-focus/white-balance/exposure
- Edit video and send it to YouTube, MobileMe, MMS or e-mail
- Voice control – “Play songs like this”, “Call Scott”
- Digital compass
- Accessibility – VoiceOver, color inversion, zooming
- Nike+ support
- Data encryption
- Instant remote wipe, encrypted iTunes backups
- Improved battery life, 9 hours of net, 10 hours of video, 30 hours of audio, 12 hours of 2G talk, 5 hours of 3G talk
- Eco-friendly construction, arsenic free glass, BFR free, mercury free LCD
- US$199 for 16Gb, US$299 for 32Gb, US$99 for 8Gb iPhone!
- Available June 19th in US, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, UK
- Progressive roll out to another 6 countries a week later, no Australian dates yet
iPhone 3.0
- cut/copy/paste/undo
- MMS support (later this year for AT&T customers)
- Search, Spotlight
- iTunes U now on iPhone iTMS
- Rent and purchase movies from phone
- Finer grained parental controls
- Bluetooth tethering to share connection “Requires carrier support” (ie presumably they just need to allow it!)
- Safari Javascript 3x faster
- Support for HTTP streaming audio and video, automatically determine best quality (what codecs I wonder?)
- HTML5 support
- Software based keyboard in portrait and landscape
- Find my iPhone, for MobileMe users shows last known location of the phone, lets you play a sound and send a message, and remote wipe the phone if necessary (to be restored from backup if you find it later).
iPhone Demos
- Asphalt 5 – car racing game
- Airstrip
- Critical Care – Monitor patient vitals via Push
- ScrollMotion – create digital books for the App Store, download them from inside the app
- TomTom – turn by turn direction app, and car accessory kit via the Accessory framework
- Star Defense
- Plus Network
- Pasco – sensors for iPhone
- Zipcar – lets you find a zipcar and remotely honk the horn and unlock the car so you know which one is yours!
This is my iPod, this is my gun…
Friday, April 24th, 2009…this is for fighting, this is for fun.
Newsweek reports that the US Army are using iPod Touches and some iPhones for translation and other purposes. They’re cheap, rugged and many recruits are already familiar with using them.
Could be quite interesting if integrated with DARPA’s locationally aware wiki TIGR.
Not sure if the users get to upload their own content onto them though.
Why I force quit BBEdit
Thursday, April 16th, 2009BBEdit and I have a relationship that stretches back some 10 years at least (It still doesn’t suck).
I tend to open lots of new text documents in BBEdit to use as multiple scratchpads. These are titled ‘untitled 1′ through ‘untitled 85′ (currently). In recent versions BBEdit has introduced a scratchpad, but there’s only one scratchpad document, so you have to do all your scratchpadding in the same place, whereas multiple new documents provide some isolation if you’re doing full document search and replaces for example.
Somewhere along the way they added document persistence. So if what I’m working on kills the OS (or Safari beachballs it to death again) and the machine needs rebooting, when I relaunch BBEdit I get my documents back again. When you relaunch, the untitled documents are all there, still ready to be used. Occasionally I go through and close old ones I no longer need.
The problem is, when you quit BBEdit, it asks you to save the documents. And saving them means you have to name them all, and re-open them next time.
But not if you force quit it Then they are recovered automatically on the next launch, and you don’t need to think up names for them.
Perhaps they just need to implement multiple scratchpads
Apple Keyboards available with or without numeric keypads
Tuesday, March 10th, 2009Whilst browsing through configuration options for the new Mac mini I noticed that you can buy either “Apple Keyboard with Numeric Keypad” or “Apple Keyboard” to go with it. Obviously you can ditch the numeric keypad if you’re only going to be using it as a media centre PC or something. The Apple Keyboard has the same layout as the Wireless Keyboard.
