I haven’t spoken much of cool adds-on the my gadgets, but with the raft of new cases announced for the iPad2, I wanted to mention what I think is one of the finest cases I have ever had for a piece of electronic gear. In serach for the best case for my iPad, I started with the requisite Apple rubberised case. For the €29 it was actually not a bad piece. It protects the nice shiny object of affection, has a light flip cover and also a bit of a stand. It wasn’t that bad, but to add a touch of class i picked up a Cygnett Lavish leather case. Again it is not a bad case. This one set me back €39 and is fine soft black leather. There is no stand function and the clasp is a magnetic one. The fit is decent, but with a little bit of give. The downside on any of these two cases was the need to slide them out of what would be a tight case to put them into the cradle and use the keyboard. The Cygnett case also had a bit of a backward feel when you opened the case. To make it fit the assigned slots you end up with a cover that flip to the left. It probably feel right to a left handed user, but to me it always seemed odd. Not bad case though and if you are in the €39 range I would recommend it.

Late last year the fine folks at GruUpy offered the lovely Jivo Executive Case for 50% off of the €79 normal cost. I jumped at what seemed a deal and I have been very, very impressed with this case. This case has many fine features. I have been particularly impressed by the way in which the iPad is held in place. It’s very secure, but also easy to get in and out. There are two very well crafted leather pockets and two elastic straps. Very well engineered. The flip mechaism is very sturdy and has 5 settings. The non-scuff interior of the case works as advertised and seems nice soft and well sticked to the exterior. The case is a very soft and well crafted tan leather. The stitching is very high quality and I have grown to even appreciate the racing stripe band.

I carry the case with me constantly and have found it to be very durable, grippable, snazzy and protective. Just yesterday I had the iPad restifn in the front basket of a dublinbike as I shot across town. It was tossed around a bit and the iPad was well protected. I am very impressed with this case and think it well worth the money. Although I was able to get it at a discount, having used it for the last few months I would gladly pay the full amount and would recommend it to any iPad user looking for the perfect case for their device.

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Everybody’s doing it. They are sitting on that great idea for a next amazing application. The first lesson that Yarmosh empahsises in App Savvy is that your ‘app idea must be more than just an idea.’ The amazing rate of adoption of iOS-based appliances and the confluence of the effective marketing tool that is the appStore have created a new business model. One that allows for amazing exposure, huge first mover advantage and extremely low barriers to entry. One of the biggest challenges beyond actually creating the application is understanding the labyrinth that is getting it added to the store. Thankfully this book addresses this challenge and provides much much more. This is *the* textbook for iApp development. However, this book is not dealing with iOS coding, but instead with the larger process. It rises above the process of building the application and addresses the entire development process through building to delivery — moving from conceptualisation to realisation.

Yarmosh starts from basic business principles and quickly moves into the specificities that make the iApp business proposition a special beast. This book is directed at both entrepreneur and developer alike, and provides a comprehensive survey of the . Additionally, the content of this book provides an intriguing look at the mechanics that guide the business proposition that is the app Store and creates a bit of a case study source in itself. The inclusion of interviews/case studies with successful developers that rounds out an extremely valuable read.

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Ok. First blush reaction to the latest O’Reilly Press title “Best iPad Apps” was that it although timely it would quickly grow dated and the premise seemed best suited to a periodical magazine or website than a book. But…I was prepared to be convinced that the editors at O’Reilly had made a correct and in fact bold move with this title. The premise of the book is to excite users about the amazing things they can do with their new iPad by identifying the best apps available to take advantage of the revolutionary device.

The book is very high quality, and the prose is wonderfully lively prose — not words that I would typically use to describe a techie publication. The organization of the book is logical, breaking into product categories similar to those in the App Store. categories such as At Work, At Leisure or At Home seem sensible. I am a little unsure though about how At Leisure differs from at Play. Maybe it does, but it’s a rather subtle distinction. What this leads to is the use of the book as a browse rather than search reference. This is not necessarily a bad thing and in fact I would expect that this book is in fact a superb selling device for apps on the store. I would be unsurprised where Apple to license the ebook and make it available to iPad buyers as a catalogue. The tendency however would be to work through the book from start to finish rather than refer to it when one wanted to find a particular app to suit a particular need.

Each page features a separate application featuring a screen shot of the application, a short summary of the application and a couple callouts highlighting the special features of the app. Apps are characterized as being best in their class (unfortunately another aspect I fear will become dated). As a reader/user however, I would appreciate knowing a few of the other contenders for that title so I might investigate an make the decision for myself.

Overall I would describe the experience of this new O’Reilly book as playful. It’s lively, colourful and fun to read. The information contained within is useful and well presented. On the downside it will quickly grow dated as new and more exciting applications are made available.

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Yes, iSync has been with us for few years now. It should be rock solid. It’s not — yet. I recently wrote about my impressions of data detectors. Not rocket science, but a small and powerful addition to useful workflow on a Mac. That they also remind me of the promise that was the Newton makes them all the more welcome. But what can I say about iSync? One of the things that makes OSX such a compelling choice for day to day computing is the consistency of interface between applications and their ability to share information…not just data, but contexts and preferences and thus recognition and adaptability to user peculiarities that anthropomophise the laptop. The computer becomes somehow just something a little more. A trusted companion — not merely a clone of millions of other identical collections of aluminum, silicon and other substances.

When I was gifted an older PowerBook a few months ago and rediscovered OSX for everyday computing, I was delighted to discover just how much the OS had matured and been refined since its repackaging from NextSTEP. There are a plethora of creatively conceived ‘little’ apps available that marry ingenuity, creativity, beauty of execution and most importantly work seamlessly with other applications within a cohesive workflow/space.

iSync is one of the more in your face ways that this magic happens. When it works, its great and don’t get me wrong, iSync is very right. It has the modularity to recognize disparate logical devices and somehow draw them into this cohesive environment. But it doesn’t always seem to be able to fulfill this Herculean task.

I use iSync to carry out a few crucial tasks:

Synchronize information with my Sony Ericsson W580i cell phone

I located an iSync drive for the phone at www.mroach.com. I installed the driver, completed the wizard that led me through a series of steps to determine what sort of information I wanted to share and in what way. I saved the profile and whenever I click the brushed aluminum iSync button on my dock, the magic happens. Bluetooth communication is initiated and iSync always seems to work.

User story on getting the data to the Mac in the first place:

I should mention that iSync was particularly valuable in populating my personal contact and scheduling information to the Mac in the first place. With all of my data nicely ensconced in Outlook on the PC, it seemed destined to stay there. I exported a CSV file to import into Address Book on the Mac claimed it could handle csv files. After a couple hours of abortive experiences, I gave up on that approach. Some googling soon determined that there were issues with this process, but that there was a paid program that would allow you to export the data from Outlook in a more useful manner. But, a substantial cost for a one-time operation. Another solution was to try and sync the Outlook data with Google Calendar and Contacts and then sync from the OSX side. Again, probably works, but only with paid solutions. Being habitually parsimonious, I was determined to find a better way and this is where a clever iSync solution emerged. The intermediary was my Palm TX. It has languished lately as I have been laptop focussed. It used to be sync’d daily with Outlook using KeySuite, but it has lately been used for a particularly addictive little game that is useful when sitting waiting for an appointment or other short delays. I reinstalled KeySuite and sync’d to the Palm. I then installed the Palm Desktop software on the Mac, went into the prefs and enabled iSync support so that data could flow to other Mac apps. Success! All of my contacts and appointments appeared in iCal and Address Book after a suitable amount of waiting. Moreover, this was all accomplished via Bluetooth and wirelessly. The only caveat is that I was not able to carry over all my meticulously applies categorization, but it gave me a start. Most importantly, iSync does so a good job of syncing that information go forward.

I give iSync top marks or this. There are drivers for so many mobile devices (most user contributed) that this mobile sync is very practical and efficient.

Synchronize Information Between the iMac and Laptop

Syncing information between machines is handled right through the Mac OS. In the System preferences, Apple likes to drive you to use their .Mac service — and syncing I will admit is a useful way to drive people to use .Mac. While it doesn’t handle file syncing per se, I use FolderShare for this, what this syncing tries to do is give you a seamless work environment regardless of which Mac you find yourself using. So a laptops contacts, schedules, preferences, web bookmarks, and widgets are kept synchronized between machines. You set the schedule in the prefs panel (how often and what you want to synchronize) and iSync via .Mac does the rest. This system largely works, and apart of schedules that inadvertently use different timezones, you are rarely presented with any decisions or even notifications that the sync happens. It just does. This works well.

Again I tip my hat to the efficient integration of data through iSync.

Synchronize between OSX Applications

Here is where it all comes together. Basic productivity for me steps beyond just straight word processing in Word or Pages or number crunching in Excel or Numbers. I use a GTD app to track my tasks. I have been using iGTD and experimenting with others, such as OmniFocus or Things. I have been doing focussed research writing in Scrivener. I am online most of the time and flit between online web services and local apps. As it turns out the best way for third party developers to share information is via iSync.

This is where things start to get a little less smooth. The building blocks are in place, but unlike the user interface, where there is a nice toolbox to enforce some consistency, at a data level, there is ironically much more latitude for each developer to decide they have a better way and to implement such. This doesn’t absolve Apple of some complicity in this same hubris. Applications like Address Book are built up from very simple underpinnings, going back to NextSTEP days, but they have subsequently been tailored to an Apple defined lifestyle focus. It’s the ‘i’ thing. It’s really not a business focus, that’s for sure. Address Book has to work with other apps to mange contacts for business use. Otherwise you end up populating the notes field with all sorts of crucial, but undefined pieces of information. Information that very quickly turns Address Book into an isolated silo as there is no way to deal with the Notes field as anything other than a blob. Information there is committed to a black hole. Searchable via Address Book search and Spotlight, but not addressable by other apps that may be able to use it. So when you actually go to invoke iSync prefs in an application that is aware, you wade into undefined territory. Too much latitude? At this stage, iSync has no real way to compare apples with oranges, but it tries. I guess I can’t blame ‘it’ for doing so. The problem you run into is that it does tend to assume some data conformity and receiving apps such as iCal receive the information assuming the same data conformity.

iCal is an application in need of some real love right. I don’t think there is any real way to excuse its state right now either. For the past couple of months, it has been crashing with some regularity and presenting me with the Apple requests for more information about what went wrong. I actually was filling these things in. I now have this vision of Apple employees actually filtering these for those gullible enough to waste time submitting these and chuckling at the most earnest and honest explanations. Because it is such a solitary experience (Apple thanks you for this, but doesn’t suggest a link to a problem that sounds familiar in their knowledge database — as Microsoft does — better than Apple here!) I actually wrote a final piece suggesting what they could do with their app and all the bug reports I was filing. Great promise, but sadly broken.

In the end, I started out with this piece to rant a little and relieve frustration over slow syncs and broken dreams ;-) but I have to admit that data synchronization actually works very well in this environment — it’s just at a nascent stage. There’s much work to be done, but the promise is evident and temporary frustration is alleviated by appreciating where this is all going. The dream of conformal computing where the device learns about you and adapts to your needs. Adapting to your peculiarities and yet meeting needs that emerge from your use, not from the developer’s tremendous foresight. This either goes all to HAL…ha, ha, ha, or to back to the golden age of 1984 (the Apple version) where we do actually experience a computer for the rest of us, and if they are so smart, why don’t they learn about how we work, rather than subjecting us to adapt to their way of doing things.

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I feared the trackpad. I am not the biggest fan of the trackpad. I gather that my namesake, the CTO at Synaptics is responsible for some of the biggest breakthroughs as the trackpad gained laptop cred during the 1990’s and so I feel a little loyalty if only by association. However, my favourite means of input is the TrackPoint — the little red nubby (that becomes less red real fast) that the IBM ThinkPad is most closely associated with. This is a very personal area. I know many users that could just not get used to using a single finger on an ultra-sensitive tiny joystick. The cursor and they could not become friends with the TrackPoint in the equation. Random survey indicates most people still carry a mouse with them and connect it — this is the case for TrackPoint as well as trackpad users. I am glancing around the coffee shop right now and frankly I am the only one relying on the built in tracking device. There’s a lot of users with big mice and small mice, but mice nonetheless. There is even a user carefully balancing one on the arm of an easy chair — that can’t possibly be comfortable.
With apologies to Douglas Englebart, I cannot go back to the mouse. Not for the laptop, and only grudgingly for the desktop. I gave the mouse another try for the last week as I wasn’t convinced that the TrackPad was hacking it. Conclusion, the mouse is even more foreign to me now. I used a nice little Apple Mighty Mouse. Lots of surfaces to associate with different outcomes, but it just doesn’t feel right. There was a time when it did. I used a nice Microsoft laser mouse for the first few weeks with the first ThinkPad I used. And then I got used to the TrackPoint. Very used to the TrackPoint. Heresy of heresies, I actually preferred using it for work in Illustrator and Photoshop, compounding the fact that I was using these applications on a Windows-based machine. My first Apple Portable was the venerable box from 1989? that had a trackball as input device. I liked the TrackBall…and still do. It fits my hand and lets me use my fingertips with percision. My thumb and/or pinky drop down and control the clicking surface. Even Lenovo (just to keep it current IBM actually made the choice) offers all but the small X series with both the TrackPoint and a TrackPad.
Maybe my choice of Point-Pad-Ball is because I don’t touch type. I am proud of the fact that I have a very rapid rate using about 4 digits, I know it doesn’t rival you speed demon TT’s, and that’s probably the majority these days. Its me, I don’t touchtype and that may impact on input device of choice. Maybe the TrackPoint gets in the way of folks having to surrender a digit (but ultimately a full hand) to navigation.
When I got a Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh in 1997, it came with a beautiful leather wrapped keyboard on a tether which I immediately lengthened. In the middle of the palm rest was a decent sized trackpad for input. Apple didn’t ship a mouse with this piece of art. In fact, you could remove the trackpad out of the keyboard and Apple included a leather piece to put in the missing space. The trackpad could then be used separately and had its own cord. It was all very neat. This factor alone convinced my Mother that she wanted one of these as well.
At that time I found the trackpad so, so. It wasn’t my chosen means of input, but the 20th Anniversary wasn’t my main machine, so occasional use was ok.
Input devices have come a long way since then and our haptic transition to gesture-based inductive sensing has created the usual iFrenzy. Its probably the future and trying pinching and the like on an iTouch or iPhone is very cool. Not sure its for me, but haven’t indulged in such toys — yet. But what I can conclude is that I am no longer a mouse kida guy. I probably will always mark the TrackPoint my favourite, but back to the TrackPad.
The PowerBook 12inch has a tiny trackpad. Its far more sensitive and discrete than the trackpads on my TAM or on my PowerBook 540c. I have installed <a href=“http://www.ragingmenace.com/software/sidetrack/” target=“_blank>SideTrack to enable scrolling on the edge of the pad (despite their warning I use it under Leopard no worries). The middle button on the ThinkPad had wedded me to that function. In honesty, Apple’s trackpads and those of other manufacturers have improved much even in these past few years. To the extent that I find myself admitting that I am not dissatisfied with the little trackpad, but its just not quite the TrackPoint — for me at least.

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Last week Stéfan Sinclair noted that his upgrade to Leopard had largely been a less than awe-inspiring experience. he did find some amusement with the new Mosaic screensaver and I will admit that after trying it on his instigation, it’s pretty cool. I have to add another rather impressive addition to the list. DataDetectors! Wow. I can remember being one among many that saw the power of this sort of recognition of disjointed info on the Newton and having it take a scribble about lunch with Joe and make some assumptions and create an event in your calendar linked to the first Joe it found in your address book. So, Apple’s been playing with the technology for awhile. DataDetectors are so subtle that I suspect many people might be missing them. I did. Then the other day, I happened to note the little rectangle form itself around a date and time with a little arrow. I remember that Steve Jobs had mentioned this during a keynote at some point. I clicked the arrow and asked Mail.app to create a new iCal event. Colour me impressed. It created an event at the exact right time and date figured out that the data adjacent to place: was what it was and populated that field and even caught the topic of the presentation making that the event title. It really worked. Imagine my amazement. No ‘freckled eggs’ ;-) I will have to tpy with this a little further and see how well it works with info not so nicely formatted, but so far…very impressed. I know that MailTags are much more powerful, but I am impressed with the simplicity of DD.
I am a big fan of integration of tools such as email and calendar and address book. Outlook does do a fine job with this under Windows, but Apple has taken a different tack by wiring these things at a deeper layer of the OS. Theoretically this should allow use to choose favoured apps and thus have greater freedom to work the way that we want to work. I like this.

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Perhaps there is an inner historian within me. The latest spate of reviews featuring the iPhone versus this challenger and that has me thinking that at the pace that we move today we don’t take enough time to reach a little further back to consider our forward progress. This case in point, everyone evaluating the iPhone or the iPod Touch (hereafter ITouch — as I am sure Apple would have rather called it) seems to be pitching it against the Nokia N95, HTC Kaiser, or the latest Blackberry. All appropriate for being the current flavour of the market — and when it comes to cell phones, they have such a limited shelf life. How long does the average phone remain current these days? Despite Apple’s slight revamp of the iPhone, I will go out on a limb and suggest that it may have greater longevity than most. However, not because for technical prowess, but to Apple’s marketing panache. Nonetheless, as I look at the comparisons, I am struck that we might best be able to gauge how much of a technical marvel it is by comparing a little further back.

The new AT&T Tilt (aka HTC Kaiser) reminded me in profile of my original Psion 5mx…and I got to thinking that a comparison between the the IPhone and a Newton is not really that far a stretch. My Newtons (culminating in the marvellous 2100) and the Psion are still wonderfully futuristic devices that got rather short shrifts. The Newton apparently for personal Jobs-Sculley reasons and the PSion because it was one of those funny little British things that just don’t get the mass exposure needed for viability.

As we ponder the effectiveness of the on screen virtual iPhone keyboard, one cannot be left unimpressed by the versatility of the technology. Technology that guesses what key you meant to press rather than actually pressed! Yet, for the great leap forward, I wonder why there isn’t a preference that allows you to match the keyboard to your finger size — or whether you are ‘typing’ with your fingers or operating the keyboard via your bug, clumsy thumbs. Mine have been too big and too clumsy every time I have tried the keyboard on the iTouch. While there were some technical flaws with the hinge mechanism on the Psion, that keyboard let one touch type on a tiny, yet powerful keyboard that folded into the device when not needed.

The Newton Keyboard was a little more cumbersome as it was a separate device, but it was a responsive little thing and allowed you the luxury of carry or not carrying.
The interaction with both these devices was surprisingly accommodating. You could be very screen driven very keyboard driven, or find your own combination of the two. With newer entrants I have found that you don’t have nearly the options of finding your best way of interacting with the device. You could hack the OS to your heart’s content and the manufacturer’s worked closely with third parties to develop an array of peripherals and software packages to meet diverse users’ needs.

One of the great pluses of the original Palm Pilot (name very deliberately used) was that it only let you interact in one way — but that one way was simple and solid. You either adapted to the Pilot or you didn’t. I remember experimenting with a paper based version (much in the same way it is legendized that Jeff Hawkins did with a wood block) to see if it would work for me. The reward from this limitation of interaction was an instant-on, speedy address book with calendar. Overtime, the beauty of this simple approach was lost, but there was initial value in the tradeoff of speed for flexibility. Without sounding like the old codger remembering how things were done in his day, I wonder why it is as we have all the processing power of the iPhone running OSX that it isn’t just a wee bit more accommodating of our individual peculiarities. Is it the hubris that smacks of omniscient engineers that will teach us how we should use their devices?

How does an iPhone compare to a Newton or a Psion? I would suggest that there are areas in which the older devices demonstrate that trade offs have been made over time that have taken us down a different road. However, rather than pausing as we proceed down that road, and glance back to ensure that it was the right fork, we have moved along with little regard to where we came from. It like the marathon runners in a clump, taking a certain fork and continuing along, only glancing to their competition to the side to determine that they have taken the right route and assuming that since everyone else is on that path, then it must be the right and therefore best one.

This is all highly subjective of course. As my eye continue to fail, I am increasingly conscious of contrast and screen legibility. So, I come to be appreciative of the wonderfully backlit Newton or Psion (the Newton has served as a flashlight for me a couple times — you can light the room with that wonderful green glow). The screen on the Newton was phenomenal by the 2100 iteration. Unfortunately by the time it reached this pinnacle, it had also become tagged with ridicule for the poor initial performance of the text recognition engine. The history of computing is strewn with those that have rushed to market with underpowered devices to to gain the first mover advantage, only to succumb to harsh reviews that stall its subsequent momentum. Its obviously a close run thing. The 128K Macintosh in 1984 was severely handicapped and it was only through some fancy footwork with the Fat Mac and the subsequent Mac Plus that momentum was both sustained and eventually augmented.

The OS of the Psion was similarly impressive. Now it has evolved in to the Symbian OS of the Nokia phone and possibly been the inspiration for the Nokia Communicator series. The close-run thing is the thing — forgive the repetition. In so many cases, screen brightness is sacrificed for battery life, and we gain in small increments. And in the next iteration we inch a little further in the same direction, often seemingly without regard for the decision that took us down that direction of compromise in the first place.

Lenovo has made an interesting acknowledgment, if only semi-publicly. They had a winner in some of the early ThinkPad X series laptops. To my mind IBM reached a very solid plateau with the X32 and the length of time that this model sat on the price list was testament to the market’s affirmation of this. They reduced size and weight while simultaneously retaining processing power and the on-board graphics capability. Then they took a step too far. They decided that it was the small size and weight that was the crucial component in the balance and they sacrificed machine performance for another pound. The X4X series was a misstep. Small yes, but at too high a performance cost. They admitted there error and let the size of the newer X6X series creep back up and in exchange gave back some of the processing power and hard drive speed that had been lost. They caught their error, admitted their mistake and rectified it. They appear to be monitoring the balance and responding to missteps…a great little business school case.

There is no doubt that in the vision of the iPhone or the N95, one can glimpse the future of mobile computing and as we refine the notion of convergence between our mobile devices, these platforms give us room to grow, but I wonder how often those ever so crafty engineers look a little further back to see the future of mobile computing.

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So…48 hours back on a Macintosh laptop and I am in seriously danger of getting drunk on the kool-aid again. What is it that pulls one back? Having never really left was part of it. I simply was being interdenominational.

I have my iMac in the living room and an HP Media Centre in the den. I conduct most of my daily work on my laptop though. I am a happy user of an IBM ThinkPad X32. I did not come to the X32 blindly. I started using ThinkPads on a daily basis back in 1999. Before that I was that bane of the Windows world: the Mac bigot. I had a 128K Mac in 1984 and traveled the Apple path, working for the largest reseller in Canada, winning PowerBooks in contests and acquiring a small, but respectable computer museum of around 50 machines — mostly Apple. I have since divested myself (involunarily of most of them — retaining, some of the more exotic — my 20th Anniversary, an Apple II, an Apple III, a Mac clone, a ream of PowerBooks, a few Newtons, a Lisa of disputed ownership etc.) But it was 1999 that changed things for me. It was just before the Mac became the visible majority. Clearly Macs were and still are the minority, but they are quite fashionable to wear in public and if you are in education, they have an inflated popularity.

This is not to pass judgement on technical abilities, quality or value, but at some point, we hearty pirates remained so in name, but not in substance. You aren’t taking a chance by buying a Mac anymore. There’s no extra steps that we have to do to fit in. In many cases, the other side makes the effort. Its a real shift, but one that’s even more so apparent when you are on the other side.

In 1999, corporately we had to bridge the Windows and Mac world. So our desktops stayed Mac, we put a Windows-based machine on each desk and our salespeople got Windows laptops. Then so did I. Now, a ThinkPad is about the best you can do if you ‘have’ to embrace the Windows platform. The sleek black slab has the aesthetic appeal — and it screams that you are on the dark side — if you are there, you might as well sing it proudly — its the Mac approach to being on Windows.

I started with a T series Thinkpad. Sleek, slim and powerful. A great machine. After two years I faced the choice of going back to Mac, but after weighing the options, it made sense to get another ThinkPad. I had a fully kitted out G4 at the time and I had a need to run some Windows stuff. Emulation sucked. We lived that lie for a long time — much like the marketing speak that convinced us that PPC architecture could grow infinitely whereas Intel was going to hit the ceiling in 1995 and die a horrible death. Yeah…ironic, eh?

So, unfortunately, I went Windows for mobile and OSX on the desktop. I would argue that Apple makes finer laptops than desktops and I had my usage reversed. But, without the material resources to have one of each, it was one of the other. Over time, I became more mobile and I toyed with smaller laptops. I wanted to stay Thinkpad and I picked up a cheap X30 to play with. Sweet. I weighed off the advantages of the more powerful T40 and the convenience of the X30. In the end I managed to find an X32 that was the perfect compromise. Nearly the power of the T40 in the footprint of the X30. I was stuck with three laptops (a rough luxury — but one I couldn’t afford). Managed to find good homes for the two and moved to an X32-centric universe.

The little black slab has been a trooper (and still is). Earlier this year I pushed it a little too far and have done some irreparable heat damage to it running SQL routines that should have been done on any of the other boxes, but there it chugged for 12–14 hrs at a time handling some monster databases. But it has survived and despite two catastrophic failures, it soldiers on…and then came last Thursday.

A very good friend agreed to trade his original 12 inch Powerbook in exchange for some work. I am stuck on size and Apple doesn’t have an ultra-notebook these days. There are rumours everyday and we hold our breathe, but I knew that the little PB was really the machine that interests me. No, its not intel-based so no multiple OS. No, there’s no iSight built in and right now I am running on 384Mb after adding 128. It has a small drive and it’s the original 867Mhz model. But it is one of the sleekest pieces of kit tech that I have touched in a long time.

Why is it so cool? Well, its got to do with the whole experience. Its starts with the superficial. It looks better than anything else out there. No question…nice little rounded corners, appropriately lit and oriented apple on the hood. It slips in an out of a knapsack as it should. No square corners to make you have to jiggle. It just goes sloooop. Perfect. The tactility if supreme. It’s cool and sleek, it’s hot and solid. The little light in the latch that throbs when it is sleeping is the subtle little touches that make a Mac special.
The keyboard is amazingly good. Now, I am coming from the gold standard in laptop keyboards and the one in the Powerbook is pretty close to being as good.

As I gush along through this, I have to comment that finding those neat little OSX only apps that I really couldn’t benefit from over the past few years is a special little secret treat. Stock trade like iLife and IWork are increasingly visually refined, but lets not fool ourselves, they are crack cocaine. Apple uses them to sell hardware and the most recent versions push the limits of this older hardware. But the subtle touches remind you that they are just shy of black magic. The fact that the little mail swoosh was lost on me running on a desktop Mac. With headphones plugged in I sent some mail and it audibly passed right in front of me as it winged it way to destination. That that sound is stereo is just too cool.

There are some negatives. I am still not happy with the trackpad, but I am not as displeased as I thought I would be. I do wish it was one of the later models that allowed for two finger scrolling. I do miss that from the Thinkpad. I still believe that the touchpoint controller is the most natural input device that I have ever used. Similarly, the control key (and that I have to use it to be able to pretend like I have two buttons on the trackpad) is a pain. CTRL/Opt/Cmd is too many modifier keys for me, especially when coming over from Windows. I am used to using CTRL-C there and use CMD-C on the Mac, even though the other key is there. Three is too many. Yeah, its got USB 1.1 rather than 2.0 and image transfers suck, but to be honest, this machine makes you want to work around these shortcomings.

Over the past few years, I have bemoaned the switch to OSX from previous MacOS’s. I called it the primary school pencil approach to interface. Everything too big…visually impressive, but wasteful of precious screen space and indicative of imprecise interaction. Sitting using OSX again (and I am reflecting on NextStep here) there’ more detail than I superficially enjoy on the desktop. On this cute little laptop, I realize some subtlety that I missed by appreciating from afar.

I am typing away on the PB right now, using OSX-only Ecto to compose blog posts and even though I am running 10 main apps under 10.4 in this miniscule amount of memory, its still working. There’s something impressive in that.

And this brings it all together. The experience is all-encompassing. The feel, the sight, the interaction, the tactility, the sounds bring one into commune with an inanimate object in a very strangely sensual way. This Powerbook 12 is sexy. Its has its flaws, but right now these are what makes the relationship personal.

Have I returned to the fold? Seen the dark side for what it is? Well, time will tell. Right now, the honeymoon continues.

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So, another Steve Jobs/Apple keynote over and the hype of the advance pundits leaves one feeling a might let down. This is the first keynote that I can recall that sparked mainstream news coverage in advance. I was watching my local news station this morning and they gave Steve & Co., at least 30 seconds of air time in anticipation (admittedly of things iPhone). I can remember when introduction of machines that would go on to become incredibly successful (the phrase ‘insanely great’ wafted through my memory for a second) didn’t rate coverage outside of technology media as recently as two years ago. It only took Apple 30 years to achieve this.
On the upside, I am writing this on Safari for Windows and so far am very impressed. The anti aliasing is finer than FireFox and the screen-render speed is somewhere in the vicinity of where Steve claimed it would be — blazingly fast. Colour me pleased with it thus far. I really like the little things that you note, such as the browse button behaviour and better indication (an icon and title) that the file you uploaded is linked to. These are nice touches. I was always hoping that the folks at the Omni Group would port their browser (or any of their other exceptional products) to Windows. Safari thus far seems very graceful and polished, if a little less than standard…but with the wide chasm between FireFox and IE 7, where are standards? The lack of borders on the window and the reduced screen real estate are a pleasure — ironically as these are the exact features that I don’t feel when I use it under OSX. If anything, OSX feels like it takes up too much room for the infrastructure, leaving nut as much for the actually focus of the work.
I don’t blame Steve Jobs, he has a wonderful stage presence and I always do look forward to an hour or so of fine entertainment (a stage show for geeks I suppose). Its rather similar to watching the series finale of a beloved TV show and having the video and audio just snap to nullity ;-) Major lack of shock twice in the space of 24 hours. Truthfully, am not so disappointed in either. The Sopranos held me rapt for the last 5–10 minutes just hanging on for crack of a gunshot, and kudos to David Chase for a brilliant series and a suitably open-ending. As for Steve Jobs and Apple, this was a WWDC keynote and it should and did focus on Leopard. Things look very solid and the visual baubles (aka the new finder) do look intriguing. We’ll have to wait and play and see if they turn into useful additions. I will admit to not being a big dashboard widgeteer or even really using Exposé that much. Like Beryl, they are one form of expressions of the developers art, but then so is compact, efficient code that lets me do what I need to do easily and efficiently.
As to the iPhone portion of the keynote…I am sure enough will be said by others out there.
I am writing this more to reaffirm that I can still be held in thrall by an Apple keynote and there some of the religion still burns deep inside. Catch the replays at Apple’s WWDC site.

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There’s an interesting short article on Low-End Mac about how the author uses an Apple Lisa for his writing tasks. He cites the fact that he can turn it off and resume exactly where he was by turning it back on, not having to worry about either saving documents or power outages. More importantly he reminds us to consider whether all the bells and whistles of the latest greatest productivity appas are things we actually use. I blogged earlier on this point and was comparing Word 1.0 on the Mac to the current incarnation. Without being some neo-Luddite and pretending like the older technology is that far superior, I think that there are points to be made for simple and fast.

Nonetheless, its not quite that black and white. I have tried to find an alternative word processor for use under Windows with less baggage than Word. I have been unsuccessful. Both AbiWord and OpenOffice seem as bloated and frankly try to emulate Word at the expense of actually thinking about how the human actual processes words. Admittedly there are a few challengers of note on OSX. But, what about starting with TextEdit or the like and simply being able to modularly add features as desired.

One of the other points raised relates to the concept that some tasks haven’t been improved upon by faster processors and the like. Word processing can get away with the older 68K…frankly given the choice, I would actually be very happy doing my word processing on one of the NeXT boxes and WriteNow. That was (and still is) speed with an awesomely crisp display. Pure monochrome (I have little need for colour when word processing) and a joy to the eyes. strangely far less eye candy than OSX has become bloated with. A purpose built word processing engine. I should crank up the old NeXT laser printer and see if it still works as well.

As to the age of the machine we use…think about that for a sec — a twenty four year old computer. And its not the oldest working ones about…alas, it seems like just yesterday.

Update: The pondering is usually good enough to get me exploring. In this case I happened upon PolyEdit from Russian publisher PolySoft. They have a tiny 1.3Mb word processor that reads and writes .docs and seems to have a rather robust feature set, yet runs like a wee demon. I’ll post comments if my trial goes well. So far so good.

Further Update: Well, if I didn’t need footnotes or endnotes I’d be doing well, unfortunately PolyEdit has neither. Additionally, while it will import Word 2000/XP/2003 versions, it will only save as Word v6. Pity. Its super fast and does offer a wide variety of features and the interface really works.

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