A friend (John Welch) and I were talking about pen centric computing, and we were in fierce agreement that it is not the revolution that some people pretend. Coincidentally, or because of the renewed interest, I saw an excellent speech on the state of the art in pen computing; what Microsoft and other researchers around the country are doing with the technology and where they expect it to go.
What amazed me most was not the progress we’ve made, but the lack thereof. It was good stuff, showing how we break down pen computing into areas like:
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A lot of people are very excited about it. I must admit, the features sound quite convenient. But there are a lot of things it could/could-not be.
For one, I don’t think it is a “computer”, though it obviously has some processing power. And I don’t think it is a DVR. I think it is basically an Airport Express on steroids. It basically gets its data across either a wired or wireless network, it receives the infrared commands (which it relays to your computer), and your computer does all the work. So it is a remote station for your computer, not a media station. That means your computer must be on, in order to service the iTV. This helps Apple dramatically lower the cost and parts count, and eliminates redundancy. They don’t need as much computing power, memory, hard-drive, etc., in the iTV. They can get away with all solid-state storage (possible), it is just a video playback buffer and remote video connection. Think of all the licensing stuff it avoids by NOT having iTV as an actual computer running iTunes (and its own copies of media on it), but that it is just a remote player for them! It would have the downside of if you’re having problems with your computer, then you’d be having problems with watching movies. If the network was spotty, then the media would be spotty.
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Why wireless?
There are many people with ideas. Many ideas sound good, until you know what you’re talking about. In other words, common sense isn’t all that common. To me it means thinking something through, and taking apart and idea, disecting it and the ramifications.
My brother sold his Apple stock because he heard that Microsoft was coming out with a wireless iPod competitor, and figured that would take away sales. Heck, who wouldn’t? A new wireless iPods just sounds cool, until you really think about it. Sure it is easy to market as sexy, and it’ll sell, but will people use it and like it long term?
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Apple discussed a little bit about Leopard and software directions.
It is interesting to note that Leopard slipped a little bit; originally Apple was targeting end of 2006, now along with Vista, they’re targeting Spring ’07. I’ll be interested to hear the state of Leopard from the developers; is it Beta quality or only Alpha/development, and so on. If it isn’t mature, that signals that Apple is doing lots of foundation things that take a lot of time (and impact a lot of stuff). If it is mature, and I suspect it is, it signals something else. Apple probably wants to make sure they’re AFTER Microsoft in release in order steal thunder. MS says, “look at our best”, and immediately Apple starts a campaign, cutting the wind out of their sales, with their release which says, “and look at what we offer”. Or the old, “if you have to upgrade anyways, why not upgrade to the best”.
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Apple had their WWDC keynote yesterday, and announced lots of new stuff. Some people were disappointed that they didn’t release more products, but as I mentioned in my article right before the show, this probably isn’t the right venue for too many products, and Apple generally likes to keep releases more focused. The “don’t overwhelm customers with too much at once” strategy of marketing. So keeping it on-topic with “Pro-line” of Macs and Leopard makes a lot of sense. This article is about the hardware announcements, I’ll go into the Software / Leopard stuff in another article.
It makes sense that Apple went with the Xeon (Woodcrest) processor. Mac OS’s advantage is in MP. Apple designs good high end machines, and so it makes sense to come out with the high end boxes first. Plus the other processor isn’t even released yet.
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There’s a lot of products rumored for WWDC. I’m NOT a rumor guy, if Apple told me anything, I wouldn’t write about it. But I am a business and strategy guy, that thinks about what I’d do if I was Steve/Apple. And I’ve got a history with Apple and going to WWDC, so I can at least mention what might happen, based on what has happened before (and why).
Apple has released new products at WWDC before, but usually they are laptops or pro-type computers. The supposed purpose of the show is to talk to developers, and get them excited about new OS releases (or hardware changes that are coming), so the 3rd party software developers (and their programs) will take advantage of it. So the products TEND to be focused around things that would excite developers.
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There are three books in a series about network security and hacking that I decided to review:
- Stealing the Network : How to own the Box
- Stealing the Network: How to own a Continent
- Stealing the Network: How to own an Identity
From the title, you get an idea of the subject — and from the subtitle, you can get a an even better peak into what they’re about. I didn’t bother to mention the authors, because they are all done by a pool of writers, often with more than one technical editor. These combination books tend to be more thorough, because they had many experts working on them — but often not quite as clean in tone (feeling more fragmented). Fortunately, these books worked quite well in this format, chapters are often about different stories and people — so any fragmentation or stylistic differences is less bothersome, or even unnoticeable.
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Popular software products are money making machines. Photoshop has dozens of books because it is such a complex piece of engineering. Photoshop is really designed for professionals, but because many mistakenly confuse professional with quality, it is popular among dabblers and armatures as well. I personally think that using photoshop for “dabblers” is like killing flies with a shotgun. Some pro-sumers certainly do need the power, many just don’t look for lighter and easier to learn packages. But you need to keep the target audience in mind, for the books I’m reviewing:
Up to speed (Photoshop CS2) by Ben Willmore Continue reading »
Classroom in a book (Photoshop CS2) by Annita Dennis
Photoshop CS2 Help Desk by Dave Cross
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About every few years, John C. Dvorak seems to have some acid flashback from his youth, and writes some article about the future that demonstrates not being in touch with the present or reality. The latest demonstration (at http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1927885,00.asp ) was that Apple would give up Mac OS X and go to Windows. Huh? What are you talking about John? When you hear hooves do you think “horses” or “a herd of purple unicorns”. John opted for the latter.
More observations of the show…and after effects.
I started the morning off with a keynote done by David Pogue, always an entertaining event. Actually, technically it started when my roommate staggered in after last night shindig, mumbled something about drinking too much in overly enunciated english, then passed out. But after I woke up for real, I went down to the Pogue Keynote. The early part of the show was maligning the rumor sites, and how wrong they got things. There was a special place for Jason O’Grady and the PowerPage’s “Apple Plasma Display”, earning him the butt of more than a few jokes. David was showing everyone how to use his Mac OS X Secrets to poison someone else’s machine (let’s call them Jason) with little tricks; like how to take a snapshot of their screen, use it as a desktop pattern, then hiding everything else so while it looked like their machine, they couldn’t click on anything. And other fun stuff. I personally used to like to assign shut-down as one of the users start up items. Good for about 15 minutes of fun. But with Pogue, there were guest speakers, demos, and lots of humor. But there’s only so much fun I can take in the middle of a serious show — so I wandered out about 3/4ths through and got back to the show.
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After the keynote, I wanted to run around and see a little more of the show floor. After reading of my complaints about sore aching feet, Owen had taken pity on my plight, and brought gifts. Doctor Shoals foam inserts for my shoes, and scissors to make them fit. While they didn’t turn my loafers into walking shoes, they went a long way to making me hobble less, and feel a little more human – and I’m not looking at walking the floor with quite the dread I had been.
I went booth to booth, in total random order, just looking at whatever products caught my eye. The first one was Garmin, makers of GPS systems – which tied right in with the geocaching article I previously wrote (http://mymac.com/showarticle.php?id=2184), and hobby I’ve been playing with. They are working on porting all their software “before the end of the year”. That’s a great sign – it has been rumored that someone high up in Garmin is an anti-mac-bigot and was actively campaigning against Macs. This seems to show that isn’t true, or that person is gone or has seen the light that another 5-10%+ of the U.S. market could mean.
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I had an interview with Kevin Conner, Director of Product Management at Adobe. Do to timing windows, I had 15 minutes. Being the tactful guy that I am, I ask, “So everyone in the world is going to ask this, but I want your canned answer. Why did you make LightRoom directly against Aperture, and how do you think it is better than Apple’s Aperture?”
The guy looked like I had just passed gas in an elevator, loudly. I’m thinking “What, I don’t have a lot of time, and this is of course the most significant question on buyers minds”.
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So here I am, waiting for the show. In a few hours, you’re going to be bombarded with every Mac website (including this one), discussing what was released. But I figured I’d relay a few stories about what it like being at the show, waiting for the release.
First, Pasadena high-society Women have nothing on Mac-Heads in the ways of gossip when it comes to MacWorld and new product announcements. “Oh, John, did you hear what’s going to be released? I heard Marsha tell Sally that Sue’s cousin who works at Apple told him that he read on the Rumor sites, that we’re getting” and so on. It is the talk of the town.
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Specs you really care about? – If you’re a geek
Lots of people will parrot specs — this is more observation. I played with one, asked questions, and just dinked around. Here’s what I found out.
While Apple doesn’t have a party line for battery performance (yet), they will say they are hard at work getting numbers. By yanking the cool new magnetic cord (which takes a lot more force than you’d suspect, and leaps back to position at the slightest opportunity) the new machines said they had about 3:11 of battery life. I thought this was a little less than the current generation of PowerBook. However, I tried on a few Aluminums, and they showed numbers in the high 2′s (2:58 or so). And with the MacBook, the display was brighter (on full), it is far better performing (I couldn’t find a way to disable one-processor while on battery, or other tuning options). Of course that little time menu has never been horribly accurate for me. So I suspect things will get better over time, and the MacBook will outperform the current machines in both speed AND battery life.
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Well, I just flew in to drizzly San Francisco, to prepare for the MacWorld expo. I shared a plane with master Mac writer and aficionado Schoun Regan.; if you call “sharing a plane” him getting bumped to first class (something about traveling about a billion miles each year) and eating omelets and being served drinks while I was stuck back with the coach traveling unwashed masses, fighting for elbow space to scarf down my Special-K cereal. But I’m not bitter or anything. We’ve known each other for years in the Mac industry, and my wife is a flight attendant – thus like all of them, she knows Schoun as well. I had to fly in early (Saturday) as the flights on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday were all booked; I’m going to take that as a little symbol of how popular MacWorld Expo is becoming – that even the U.S. overcapacity in the airline business can’t keep up with the masses coming to see the new products. .
Some people may have heard of a fad called geocaching, however the international swell of cachers is just too large to call a trend a fad, any more than you’d call hiking or biking a fad. Companies are making products for it, there are multiple associations, and it is becoming a new “sport”, at least as much as hiking could be called a sport.
For those not yet “in the know”, geocaching is a new technology related activity where users go online to one of the websites like http://www.geocaching.com or http://www.navicache.com and they lookup various waypoints (points of interest) either around their area or around some place they’re going to visit. They then enter or download these into a handheld GPS unit (GPS’s use global positioning satellites to tell you exactly where you are, anywhere in the world), and then off the trekkers go. They drive or walk until they are in the area, and then follow the GPS, hiking or biking their way along. The GPS unit will get from with a foot or two, to about 30 feet away from the “cache”.
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David Every wanted to look at the year in review (in regards to Apple) to reflect on predictions he had made.
At the beginning of 2005 I said I expected Apple’s stock to hit $110-$140 and then split within a year. Turns out I was wrong — Apple split, then went up to $70′s+ ($140 pre-split level). I’m pleased that my financial predictions were that dead-on. You can read the original article at: http://www.mymac.com/showarticle.php?id=1917.
Of course, even a broken clock is right twice a day. And one lucky hit doesn’t make me a financial analyst. Any long term predictions require luck as well as strategy. Analyst often focus on the minutiae to see how well a company is going to hit their next quarter predictions, while I’m looking more at the industry and company to try to figure out trends for the next year. So let’s look at Apple’s different operating segments (as they break them down), think about strategy, and look forward.
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Ending spam: Bayesian content filtering and the art of statistical content filtering
by Jonathan A. Zdziarski
No Starch Press
ISBN: 1593270526
Price: $39.99 U.S.
In case you haven’t noticed, I agreed to many book reviews. I enjoy reading and learning, so the idea of free books appeals to me. Especially on topics I enjoy; and Spam has always been an interest of mine.
First, I must say that Johnathan Zdzarski picked a great publisher. Many publishers just throw promo copies of books to the four winds to fulfill their contractual obligations, or count on their name or the brand recognition of the book series, and you never hear from them again. Not with No Starch Press. Patricia Witkin does her job and was all over me, making sure I did my review, and available for input. Some writers get whiney about a publisher holding their feet to the fire; but I am in awe, that in this jaded world, there are people like her doing her job so well. Seriously, if I put out my own technical book, I’m going to target them first — even if they aren’t the largest publisher, they do their job of promotion.
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I’ve always enjoyed Presentation software, and I recently got my MBA (Masters Degree in Business Administration), which required bimonthly presentations. I’ve used Keynote quite a bit lately, and had sort of a love/hate relationship with it. Some features like quality of output are fantastic along with the price; others like ease of input, power, compatibility fall more into the “less than love” side of the equation. But this review isn’t about Keynote itself; it is about two new books to teach it to you.
The two books I’m reviewing are:
Creating Keynote Presentation with iWork by Tom Negrino Continue reading »
Keynote 2 for Mac OS X by Tom Negrino
So we’re lacking a lot of versatility in authors. Peachpit Press also produces them both; so we’re lacking versatility in publishers as well. Fortunately, I didn’t dislike either the publisher or the Author, or this would lead to a rather depressing review.
Finally, a multi-button mouse from the big Apple; and with a few new cool features to boot. I ran out to my “local” Apple store, a mere 40 miles away, and was the first on my block to fork out my $49.95 for mine. I probably could have saved a few bucks by using either an Education (Student/Teacher) or Developer discount; but frankly the $5 difference wasn’t worth the effort. Even-though I was in the store early, I got one of the last few they had. So was it worth it? Read on.
History
In the 80′s and the early 90′s I was raving about the superiority of the single button mouse. User studies had showed that people got confused when using a mouse with more than one button, and that double-click and click and drag were far easier for people to understand as well as less error prone than a right or left click (two button mice), or worse, right or center or left click (three button mice).
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