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I thought the MS Surface table computer prototype was pretty laughable, but they’ve managed to take the awkwardness up a notch with the Sphere prototype. All of the wonderful distortion of a spherical projection, combined with the limited shared visible space around the sphere to impede collaboration. Wonderful. So now I can view a distorted photograph, but the person next to me sees an oblique partially obscured view of the same photograph - unless they’re on the other side of the sphere, then they see nothing. And vice versa.

It’s surprising, because there is some seriously cool technology under the hood, using the projector lens to detect multitouch control gestures. But they just don’t seem to get what a touch interface can really do. It’s not about flinging photographs around. It’s about providing an adaptable interface that conforms itself to what you need to do at that moment. MS seems to get hung up on the metaphor of the projection device - flat == table, curved == sphere - rather than focusing on what a truly dynamic touch interface can do.

I want this. Well, maybe with a slimmer keyboard. Possibly a foldable version of something the size of the Apple Wireless Keyboard (pictured below). Doesn’t have to actually BE wireless, though. I’d be FINE with a USB cable, and even with slapping rechargeable batteries in the keyboard to prevent an additional power draw from the iPod Touch…

This would make the Notes app much more useful. And the WordPress app. And email. etc… etc…

I’ve had an iPod Touch for almost a week now, and aside from driving people on Twitter nuts by exclaiming how unbelievably awesome it is, I have some thoughts on how it could be better. Nothing groundbreaking, I’m sure, as anyone who spends time with it will likely come up with a similar list. The short version is that I LOVE it. In an unhealthy way. I haven’t been this impressed by a piece of technology since my first Newton MessagePad 120. And before that, my Amiga 1000. It’s that much of a game changer. [ed: both of those technologies are now defunct?] My iPod Touch has quickly become a very powerful mobile email/Google Reader/Twitter/Flickr/Blog platform. I’m not sure I could give it up now.

Software Improvements

1. Notes sync - if I enter a page of notes into the iPod Touch Notes application, they stay there. Unless I email a copy out. And the only way for text to get INTO Notes is by typing it on the Touch. No way to add, say, a schedule, or travel itinerary, etc… without typing it all manually. wtf? It would be ideal if Notes either synced with a folder in ~/Documents/Notes or were managed by iTunes directly - for this to be a truly useful feature, I need to be able to DO stuff with the notes, not just write stuff down. Getting Notes both onto and off of the Touch are pretty important.
2. Wifi toggle. I try to save the battery as much as possible, which means spinning down wifi when I won’t be using it (while on the bus, while it’s idle, etc…) but currently each toggle requires about 5 taps. Home > Settings > Wifi > On/Off > Home. It would be handy if there was an icon on the Home screen to just toggle wifi.
3. Temp on Weather icon. The Calendar icon shows the correct date. Why doesn’t the Weather icon show the current temperature when it’s available?
4. Copy/paste. Of URLs, text in emails, text in Safari. Not essential, but would make things easier when sharing stuff.
5. GReader offline app - Gears? SDK? I’d love to be able to load up my RSS feeds in the morning, read them on the bus, and sync stuff when I get to the office. Like Gears does, but without the laptop.
6. Photos sort by date not filename. Seriously. Why would I sort by filename? Want to show a series of photos? Hope you didn’t rename any of them in Aperture, because the order will be all messed up. Bizarre.
7. Sketch app? Perfect cocktail napkin!
8. Flash. Not 100% essential, but it would be great to be able to interact with Flash apps and view Flash Video.
9. Display name + contact info on unlock screen. If I lose it, and it’s locked with a PIN, how will the honest person who finds it know who to give it to? I’m not going to put a sticker on it. (and if a dishonest person finds it, it’s gone either way)
10. Ability to have files (pdf, etc…) copied onto the iPod for access without a network connection
11. Ability to cache multiple locations and sets of directions in Map for use without a network connection. Having Maps is really cool, but a bit useless if I need an active wifi connection to get any details out of it. It caches some stuff, but not enough to make it really useful when offline.
12. Safari should remember usernames and passwords - doesn’t have to be full Keychain integration (or at all) but this would be handy for browser-based authentication that doesn’t use cookies (wifi hotspots…)

Hardware Improvements

1. Volume control without touch screen. The double-home-button-tap trick is really nice and elegant, but still requires that I dig the Touch of of my pocket and look at the screen. Every iPod I’ve had before would be just as easily controlled by blindly tapping a button and/or spinning a wheel.
2. Camera.
3. Microphone - ability to record audio.
4. STUCK PIXEL!!! AAAAAAHHHH!!! 5 days after getting my iPod Touch, it developed a dead pixel. A really obvious one, too. The flashing-colours website fix works for about half an hour or so, then it creeps back. I can’t remember the last time I’ve had a stuck pixel on any of my displays. (jinx 1234!)

Nothing too earth shattering, and certainly nothing to cry about (well, except maybe that stuck pixel. sniff.). You’ll have to pry my iPod Touch from my cold, dead hands. And even then I’d probably give up a pretty good fight.

Jeff Han gave a presentation at last year’s TED conference, showing his tactile interface system. Forget mice and keyboards. This is a less-creepy version of Minority Report. Or Star Trek’s LCARS interface.

I’ve watched it 3 times today. I want my next computer to work like this. How about a 30″ Cinema Display that tilts backward to become a tabletop surface with tactile interface…

It’s just synchronicity that this video happened to be next in the queue on my iPod this morning, less than 48 hours after the iPhone was demonstrated with its own mini version of this UI…

ps. I’d love to be a lurker at this year’s TED. I’d have to be lurking, because the caliber of the attendees is so unbelievably high. Maybe I could be an usher or something. It’d be totally worth it…

pps. aw, crap. TED2007 starts the day before I get on a plane with the family. Maybe 2008

People have said that Macs are more expensive than PCs. Until Apple made the switch to Intel chips, we had to basically eat that, because there was always the Apples-to-oranges comparison. Now that all new Macs are running the same chips that Dell etc. use, it's fair to make direct comparisons. And the result blows me away. Not only are Macs NOT more expensive, they can be cheaper. Much cheaper. Like, half the price cheaper.

Bill Bumgarner (bbum, to the WO folks out there) posted a rant about how badly the Dell online store sucks. I took it with a grain of salt, since Bill works for the Fruit Company. Then I clicked through. He was talking about Dell's new Intel Core 2 Duo "Media Guru" - obviously poised to take down the iMac. The user experience of the Dell online store is absolutely dreadful. I mean, wow does that suck. For a company with all of its business coming through their online store, you'd think they'd spend some effort to make the experience easy, efficient and maybe even not-painful. Maybe they should switch back to WebObjects…

I finally found the system Bill was referring to, and eventually managed to configure a system on par with a comparable iMac. Here's what I set up:

Dell's Media Guru (iMac killer?)

Now, for comparison, here's the iMac:

iMac Core 2 Duo 20"

Both are from the "consumer" stores, in US dollars, without any edu discounts. I had to tweak both slightly, selecting a faster processor in the Dell, and upgrading the video card, RAM, and adding AppleCare in the iMac.

The iMac is roughly half the price of the comparable Dell.

Yes. I know you can get cheaper Dells. You can get a free one just for signing up for DSL now. That's not the point. Those are el-cheapo POS PCs. For a decent system, you're looking at paying up to twice what you'd pay for a comparable Mac.

Update: Just for kicks, I tried configuring a Mac Pro with display to see what it would take for a Mac to be as expensive as this Dell. I wound up with a quad Xeon, 2GB of RAM and a 23" Cinema Display, still costing less than the Dell…

MacPro with 23" Cinema Display

My Newton MessagePad 120 came in the mail yesterday (well, it almost came on Friday, but Mail Dude decided to not even try my house, and left a card in the box to come get it the next day after 1pm. nice.)

It worked out of the box - needed AA batteries, but I knew that. I’ll be picking up a new internal backup battery asap as well. It turns out that it was very handy having an antique PowerMac 8600/300 still running in the home office, because installing the Newton Connection software (and connecting the old school serial cable) was trivial.

I had the exact same model of MessagePad back when I worked in the Faculty of Nursing (we were going to be working on PocketNurse - an offshoot of PocketDoc, which was one of the big medical Newton apps at the time). We actually had a few Newtons around, some of which were upgraded to Newton OS 2.0 (but mine never was). I think my memories of using the Newton must have been tainted by the times I used a 2.0-infused 120, because I distinctly remember a different font, and having the text insertion caret on screen - neither of these are present in Newton OS 1.3.

I also remember the handwriting recognition being much better and faster - but that’s likely an illusion imposed by memory over time. Like the way I remember the F/A-18 Interceptor flight sim on my Amiga 1000 as being photorealistic and realtime, but when I actually fired it up again, a couple of years ago, it was like 512×384 and 5 frames per second. I have a tendency to idealize memories. Not sure if that’s a common thing or not.

Anyway, I’ve downloaded a couple apps onto the MP. It’s been hard finding apps for it, since most of the apps that are in the online archives are for Newton OS 2.0. At the bare minimum, Evan’s having fun drawing on it. That’s worth it right there.

The handwriting recognition is really not that bad - the “training” process is, I think, more for myself than for the MessagePad, because I’ve noticed my spectacularly godawful handwriting and printing getting marginally more legible as I go through the process.

I’m looking forward to playing with the eMate 300 when it gets here. It comes stock with NewtonOS 2.1, so that will clear up any false memories. I might have to keep saving and spring for a MessagePad 2100 - one I was tracking on eBay just went for almost $400, though. I can’t justify that yet.

Our fancy schmancy new Power Mac Quad G5 boxes were released to us this morning. 20″ Cinema Displays, too. These bad boys have 4 x 2.5GHz G5 cores, adding up to 10GHz of raw power under the hood. Sure, there’s some overhead in spreading stuff over the different chips, and some software won’t take advantage of it, but having that much CPU power sitting ready is pretty sweet.

I just did a quick playbenchmark with Return to Castle Wolfensteina well-trusted benchmarking utility, and man this machine runs nicely

I’m just putting on some of the missing software (no XCode in our developer’s load? MySQL, etc…) but basicallly I’m on the ground running out of the box. I just copied my home directory over from a backup, and since 90% of the apps I use are in that, I’m up and running. Very cool machine.

The Cinema Display makes the LCD on my PowerBook look mighty dim. Oh, well The Mighty Mouse is pretty sweet, too. The little nipple/ball/button dealie works surprisingly well, but I’m occasionally tripping into Exposé by accidentally squeezing the mouse too hard.

Update: Spotlight and Dashboard are totally usable - instantly responsive. I’m guessing Steve has one of these when reviewing OSX releases

Update: I forgot to add the image I took to update my State of the Desktop on Flickr…

I’m pretty sure my hardware is retalliating against the new Conservative regime.

The XServe that drives weblogs.ucalgary.ca, wiki.ucalgary.ca, and pachyderm.ucalgary.ca just went south. Refuses to boot now. It’s a cluster node, so we’re trying to find a video card to see wtf is going on…

Update: OK. We found a trusty old ATI Rage 128 card, slapped it into the XServe, and booted that sucker up. It was spending a looooooong time on the boot spinning pinwheel screen - assuming it’s checking the disk here. It had to chew through ~50GB of data, so that took awhile. Then, it wanted to update firmware, so we did. It’s now fully patched, and apparently running OK. It’s seeming awfully slow, though. It’s not a RAM thing, with 5GB of the good stuff in there. It just took over a minute to connect via SSH. Definitely need to look into that. Perhaps AFTER the big afternoon presentation that relies on the software running on this server…

Well, not sure if it’s an “extreme failure” or just a failure of a LaCie Big Disk Extreme. Either way, my shiny new 500GB backup drive decided to go on strike yesterday. Maybe the most depressing day of the year got to it. Maybe it thought, as a 500GB drive, that it should have been doing more exciting things than just backing up my crap.

I was copying over the latest MySQL dumps from our production servers, and got an interesting error - “write error” - meaning, of course, that the file could not be copied to the BDE. Mwaaaaah? So I fire up Disk Utility, and it greets me with this:

Great. I grab our copy of Disk Warrior, hoping to throw its advanced repair ninja mojo at the problem. No joy. It keeps finding errors, and complaining that it’s running slowly because of a disk error. Great. So, I decide to reformat the drive to start fresh. Blowing away 110GB of backups to try to fix the drive that’s supposed to be saving me this grief. I make 2 new partitions - one for a backup system, and one for data. I tell Disk Utility to verify each new partition. It chokes on the first one.

At this point, I’m guessing it’s a hardware failure, so pack up the drive to be replaced. Now, I’m sitting here without backups, hoping that Nothing Bad Happens™ before the drive is replaced and I have a chance to rebuild the backups… To add insult to injury, the SMART status on my desktop’s system drive temporarily flickered into “DRIVE FAILING” status, then returned to OK.

Update: I’m turning comments off for this post. I think it is just aggregating unhappy customers, rather than fairly representing what LaCie products are like in the real world. And, my blog isn’t a therapy group for disgruntled consumers. LaCie fixed my drive very quickly, and it’s been running as expected ever since. Give their support folks a shot - they did the right thing by me. Should be more productive that ranting into the night about a failed hard drive.

For the last few years, I’d forced myself to make weekly backups to CD-ROM. Then, when I outgrew 650MB of backup space, I switched to DVD-R. That worked, but backing up was goddawful slow - bringing my system to it’s knees during the backup process. Eventually, I got lax about backing up. It’s been months since I’ve burned a backup disk, and I was starting to get a little nervous. I had been using a tiny portable hard drive, but it was small enough that I had to skip entire directories.

But, today Kevin The IT Elf dropped by my cube with a box - a LaCie Big Disk Extreme - 500GB (half a freaking terabyte) of room to backup with. And I think it comes with every modern connection type - Firewire 400, Firewire 800, and USB 2.0.

LaCie also provides a decent backup app in SilverKeeper - which will automatically backup stuff like my entire ~/dnorman directory, without making my system unusable during backup.

So, now I’ll set my Powerbook to backup via rsynch to my desktop, which will backup to the BDE automatically every morning at 2am. And hope an EMP doesn’t clear all of the platters…

I’m going to sound old here, but I used to have a top-of-the-line FWB RAID system for doing video in the mid-ninetees. 18GB, divided into 10 partitions. On a good day, it could push 5 megs per second. And it cost around $20K. Now, I get 25X the capacity, an order of magnitude increase in performance, for about $400. Heck, my iPod has more room and outperforms that early RAID. I’m a little scared about what kind of storage will be available in another 10 years…

Update: Don’t forget to disable Spotlight on big backup drives…