Ever read a blog, tutorial, or review only to find your burning question is left unanswered? Or worse yet you download a piece of software but find it doesn’t work for your situation, system, or amount of ram. Frustrating. Having said that I must be subject to my own rant. My proposal is that I/we all do a better job of anticipating the questions of our readers.

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It places additional responsibility on the blogger, pundit or company but I think with a little effort we can better serve the uninitiated or those with a slightly lower geek factor.

Am I asking too much? Well I don’t expect perfection nor can I deliver it myself but my hope is that we can serve our readership better. Where it depends of the use of technical devices such as computers and software; some information becomes essential. I do applaud those who in my opinion shine in this regard by being thorough and providing some clues as to the difficulty level of the task at hand.

I am typing this post in a program called Textmate it is a treasure trove of text editing capability of which I have barely scratched the surface. Yet questions remain and problems do come up. Apparently I can’t post to my hosted WordPress blog directly. It will post to a WordPress blog that is on another hosting service. Why? I have no idea; perhaps it has something to do with the gateway into WordPress.com. I did receive a response verifying the problem did exist but the actual problem was not specified. Fair enough! I got a response but I wish I knew more.

Companies and Software used in preparing this post:

• Apple Computer
• Macromates [Textmate]
• Quicksilver
• WordPress.com
• 43folders
  
• somemacblog [mine]

sub notebook, dreaming again

Appleinsider and Macrumors both mentioning some reported information on the sub notebook front. Looks as if the rollout of this product has slipped as well into late 2007 or early 2008. If this is this is true that assumes that there is such a product and I for one think that’s good news.

The big question is what and who is it for? What kind of power, storage and kind of OS will it have; full OSX Leopard, scaled down version like the iPhone, who knows? When I look at a new piece of hardware or software my initial thought after I calm down from the coolness factor, is what is it for and if it’s something that I have not used before then I ask myself how will this impact my workflow. What can I do different or better than what I am doing now. This all in the light of the fact that I have a backlog of about twenty programs that others have said is just the neatest most time saving thing they have ever used. I wish I could really utilize all that I have now on my desktop.

Still that doesn’t keep me from wanting the newest latest, greatest, lighter, cheaper, faster thing that’s new on the market. As I have opined in other places, for me the notebook computer would be a much better traveling companion when I just want to check email or do some light surfing and writing. My full laptop kit weighs at least 20lbs and that’s just too much to lug into Starbucks every time I want to do a little work. I still do it but not all the time, opting rather for a Moleskine to capture what may come when the creativity is flowing.

Lets say the Apple branded sub-notebook really makes its way into our hands it would seem that a whole new generation of apps may generated that take advantage of the memory and form factor of this new device. As usual you and I will be the winners; I think it’s a good time to be a programmer. Of course I can say that; I am not one . In the mean time we shall speculate!!

We have cell phones and we have Mac OSX Tiger, although we might wish they did things differently or better, our machines are humming along nicely for the most part. Much of the talk, writing, and blogging about the new technologies from Apple Inc. are speculation. I am sure there are a few tips and real sources that know a little bit about what is going on. If you really want to know what’s going on, call Apple Inc. and ask for a guy named Steve; cannot promise you will get through though.

What fuels all of this has to do with our dependence on, and desire for, better digital tools and to some degree it’s just tech for technologies sake. We like gadgets and all the whiz bang wow factor that goes with it. Also there is a certain industry that has grown up and thrives on all of this. The bloggers, podcasters and other tech pundits rely on this talk about technology. I don’t think there is anything wrong with talking tech but there are aspects of the coverage that goes beyond helpful information.

Some writers editorials are not based on sound information and as such lead the unsuspecting reader to erroneous conclusions.

Steve Jobs Keynote in January of this year confirmed what many had said or hoped was true there was indeed an iPhone and the reaction was very strong; hardly anyone was indifferent. Many, but not all the features we’re given their moment in the spotlight and since then many of us, small and great have weighed in on what we think it is or will mean in the future.

My final analysis is that no one really knows how the iPhone will affect things in the future but I will predict that even if it was a flop [which I doubt] it still will have far reaching implications. The cell phone makers can no longer get by with hard to use confusing interface design. Today I took another look at the iPhone and it’s features afresh and have a renewed appreciation for what only exists as some code and image files on Apple.com. It is an amazing device and at the core is some very impressive code that drives the interface. That started me thinking about Apple’s need to move resources to the iPhone team in order to meet the deadline. My instincts tell me that is not entirely true or we don’t know what Apple meant when they said they had to move resources.

I am no programmer but the iPhone supposedly uses the ARM chip and Mac’s have Intel chips so doesn’t that mean they have different instruction sets? Which means these programmers would have to bat right or left handed correct? If I am wrong about that feel free to clue me in. Hmmm..

Bottom line; iPhone will ship, Leopard will ship, iLife will ship, iWork will ship and more importantly a whole bunch of really geeky stuff will happen, that right now, is not on anybody’s radar. The ship dates aren’t really that important, what is important is that Apple is innovating and there are thousands of coders and geeks of every stripe that are extending the capabilities of this technology for the sake of managing that part of our lives that is digital.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone, Leopard, Mac News, speculation, touch Screen

According to Appleinsider there is suspicion that the real reason for the delay of Leopard 10.5 is related to the secret features more so than the iPhone.

“American Technology Research analyst Shaw Wu told clients on Friday. “We believe the extra time Apple is allocating is for developers to test secret features that will likely be revealed at its WWDC 2007 conference starting on June 11, 2007.” [from Appleinsider]

Another possible consideration is that this would give Apple an opportunity to announce the features at WWDC and then give the developers a chance to react to the new features between June and October.

This piece also appears on Some Mac Blog.

Several years ago I saw an ad for an office chair that had a phone built in to it. My coworker and I started joking about this saying.. “I’ll have my chair call your chair” etc. It’ seemed a little far fetched then but recently I’ve been contemplating just how far this connectivity thing will go. We now have refrigerators with Ethernet ports, so what might we see in the future. Will we see wireless for the Lazy Boy? Half baked idea. If you’ve seen anything of this nature in the wild I love to hear about it.

If you blog for very long, one thing you will hear from the pundits is, “content is king”. That is, you must have something that people want to hear, see, read or link to. The way that this becomes painfully obvious is how quickly your latest post can enjoy great success and then suddenly it’s gone. What happened? With fifty million blogs and counting you must be compelling to stay on the radar.

Really it comes down to how things are picked up in other forms of media. Viewer popularity and brand recognition! The more things change the more they stay the same.

There’s another page on this blog called the Blogger Chronicles which sporadically covers the business of swerving in and out of the internet/blogosphere. Check it out!

I thought it would be worthwhile to take a look at what we already know about Leopard as we await the final version. Technology in any form comes at us way too fast and I find that really using it comes through the process of re-discovery. Let’s take a look…

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It’s been a fairly amazing road map for Apple in recent years with the switch to Unix, Intel was a huge jump, new hardware and creating ground breaking software all at the same time.

In 2006 Steve Jobs gave us the “sneak peak” of Mac OSX Leopard at the annual World Wide Developers Conference and in that keynote he mentioned that there were some “secret features” that would be announced later. Hmmm… much speculation has been tossed around about what those features are but who knows really.

What we do know is this feature list; [features in detail apple.com]

* Time Machine
* Mail
* iChat
* Spaces
* Dashboard
* Spotlight
* iCal
* Accessibility
* 64-bit
* Core Animation

Each of these components has been updated and while each one has that special Apple coolness factor there is only one that is what you could call “New”. That would Core Animation. We’ve seen core audio and video but this rounds out the suite of visual tools for action based content. We know that core animation is behind the cover flow trick in iTunes and we saw what some have said was core animation being used in Steve’s “Keynote” presentation. While transitions and flying images are fun it remains to be seen what kind of user interface enhancements will come out of this. I can imagine a few and if those enhancements can be leveraged into a more streamlined workflow then Core Animation will be much more than a pretty face.

The other feature that I think is worth some additional notice is Spaces. This sort of thing has been implemented before by third party developers but perhaps were overlooked by the Mac community since the reviews were mixed regarding their effectiveness. Apple’s integration of this feature into the OS is going to make a lot more sense as our computing lives become more complex. Although the software has become more powerful and easier to use; then number of tasks we are trying to perform is always inching upward. As I type this I have seven applications running in my dock, if you see what I mean. Spaces could simplify my life but more importantly it could save me time.

Yesterday I was working with a different kind of project that required lots of documents, pdfs etc and it was frustrating trying to keep track of everything and where it went. Spaces would help in isolating just the kinds of things I want to focus on for a given task. Hence, two thumbs up for Spaces.

Last and certainly not least is Time Machine. This will be good for all of us since most of us don’t have a very good backup strategy and some don’t have one at all. It will also be good for hard drive companies since we have to have someplace to back that data up to. Let the speculations continue….

Apparently Apple does take notice of the little people, as if we didn’t know that from the recent lawsuits aimed at bloggers. I noticed that they made a stop at my little pixel patch today. This is due probably because I blogged about the iphone etc. Lest I should reveal some restricted details of upcoming products. Not to worry I don’t have any, but like many others find it challenging to speculate about what might proceed from the infinite loop. Apple seems to thrive on secrecy but it would be a bad day in Cupertino if the Mac community at large stopped trying to scoop the products ahead of the launch.

All the secrecy and the bloggers trying to uncover the secrets is probably the most effective and cheapest marketing program in history. Of course all of this would be moot if Apple didn’t deliver the great user experience that people have come to expect. See! I’ve just given them what they want; free publicity.

Perhaps I wasn’t the only one to give it but Apple did take my advice regarding their marketing efforts which came in the form of Apple retail. You have to demonstrate! Showing what the Mac OSX experience can do far outweighs all the slick TV and Print promotion. Next up! —Leopard, Let’s Review.

Shameless plug here: New blog started, with lots of digital hints tips and tricks as I mine the web.

Some Mac Blog