Rainer Brockerhoff

[Rainer Brockerhoff]

Full day today: Tian'an-men Square, the Imperial Palace, lunch with a "traditional Chinese family", a trishaw tour through the old (and quite poor) Hutong quarter, the Lama (Tibetan Buddhist) Temple, then dinner at the Beijing Qianmen Jianguo Hotel, imediately followed by the Chinese Opera at their Liyuan Theater. Whew.

Tomorrow, to the Great Wall.

[Rainer Brockerhoff]

We've just arrived at Wangfujing Grand Hotel in Beijing, China. Tired but all went very well; we're off to get some tourism done, more later.

Update: the CocoaHeads Beijing talk went quite well.

[Rainer Brockerhoff]

Now at my cousin's house near Frankfurt (Germany). All's well and we'll leave for Beijing the day after tomorrow. Today we visited Aschaffenburg, mainly the Pompejanum and the museum in the old castle.

[Rainer Brockerhoff]

So, I'm typing this from the VIP lounge at the GRU (Guarulhos/São Paulo) airport. In a few hours we'll fly to Frankfurt over Paris, and a few days later, Beijing.

Must get busy preparing my talk for Cocoaheads Beijing, was too busy to do anything before our departure. More as it happens!

[Rainer Brockerhoff]

Non-development developments, that is.

We've been busy packing for our upcoming trip to China and other Asian countries. Also, moving from our current apartment to a new one - more packing! I also just sold my desktop iMac (more packing, erh, backing-up); by the time we get back in mid-November there should be a new generation of iMacs out. Meanwhile, essentials are being copied to my MacBook Air, and I'll work based from that for the next two months.

You can tell that I decided to schedule all traumatic experiences at once! Better to get them done and over with...

Anyway, we go off the coming weekend. On the way to Beijing there'll be a stopover of a few days in Frankfurt, Germany; enough to de-lag a little, and visit with family.

If all goes well, we'll arrive in Beijing in the early afternoon of Sept. 25, and in the evening I'll do a small presentation for the local CocoaHeads chapter. (At this time, that page shows Sept. 26 but we're trying to move it to the 25th.) I gather that all members are rather young, and will be amazed at someone over 40 writing software!

At any rate, I plan to talk a little about my professional experience, then move to the main topic - tentatively named "Protect Your Application Against Evil Hackers (or, at least, against the lazy ones)" - and finally showing some pictures from exotic places like Brazil and California. If it comes off well, I'll post the slides somewhere here for downloading.

After a little more than two weeks in China we'll depart from Shanghai for a 4-week cruise, going to Japan, Hongkong, Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore and Vietnam. On the way back to Brazil there'll be another few days of stopover in Paris.

Posting updates here from China may not be easy, but I'll try.

[Rainer Brockerhoff]

I just pushed out a new build of Quay: version 1.1.2 (297). All users should update.

This fixes the bug where it stopped responding after a certain combination of clicks on the Dock. I'm still puzzled why the event tap timeout responsible for that began happening on Snow Leopard, though; it never did on 10.5 to my knowledge.

[Rainer Brockerhoff]

Quay 1.1.2 (293) is out, and supports 10.6 (Snow Leopard).

[Rainer Brockerhoff]

Progress report on Quay 1.1.2.

I've got it mostly running on Snow Leopard now. There are at least two small things that aren't working yet though, and I want to implement a couple of feature requests that should be fast and easy. All in all, it shouldn't take more than one more day, or two.

[Rainer Brockerhoff]

10.6 is early ...and circumstances conspired to make me late in checking (or, at least, ensuring) compatibility with it.

I just posted on the Quay support forum about the situation with Quay. Briefly, an interim 1.1.2 version should be out soon.

Klicko installs and runs with no problem on 10.6. However, it being a 32-bit control panel, System Preferences will restart every time it is run. Once you've set the preferences, that shouldn't be too onerous, but I still plan to do a 64-bit version as soon as possible.

XRay will mostly work if you have Rosetta installed, but with the same restrictions as on Leopard: the file browser may crash (though, oddly enough, less than on 10.5); and changing permissions on folder contents will probably fail without warning. XRay is, unfortunately, recommended for 10.4 (Tiger) users only, and most of its functionality will be reincarnated in some form or other in the delayed-but-upcoming Quay 1.2.

Zingg! and Nudge are Finder Contextual Menus, which are not supported by Snow Leopard. Their functionality will also be implemented through plug-ins for Quay 1.2.

My US International keyboard layout has finally been incorporated by Apple into their standard list of layouts, so you won't need to get it from here anymore. Yay!

Stay tuned for further announcements regarding Snow Leopard...

[Rainer Brockerhoff]

My reasoning about the possibly forthcoming iProduct was adopted by the nice folks at Mac+ (in Portuguese). For that piece, my friend, master illustrator Mario Amaya, made a few mockups which came out quite well.

Here is the closed device. I do disagree about shiny black - I think the aluminum Unibody design is more likely - but it does look good:
Regarding the name, by the way, "iBook" might be a good name to re-use if Apple really has the intention of doing to the ebook reader market what they did to the smartphone market. (It would also have the advantage that Apple already has all the registrations and trademarks.)

Here's the opened device in horizontal browser mode: This shows the foreground application on the top screen, and the virtual keyboard on the bottom screen. Note the URL and some other controls on the bottom, too. If there were other apps or widgets running in the background, either icons (Dock-like) or very reduced windows (Exposé-like) for each could be shown in a row above the keyboard.

The same mode would also be used for movie watching: and of course the movie player controls would substitute the keyboard. Notice how power consumption would be reduced by keeping most of the pixels on the bottom screen turned off - one advantage of OLED screens.

For gameplay the bottom screen would be folded completely behind the device: The game would be controlled by the thumbs in front and by the other 8 fingers on the back screen (whose pixels would be completely turned off).

Finally, here's one way of implementing the ebook mode: While I would like this to be feasible, in a first-generation device it would mean that both screens have to be the same resolution; two HD-capable screens (1280x720 at 200ppi) will probably set the device's price too high, or they'd have to go down to 1024x576 at 160 dpi, or even 800x450 at 120 ppi.

It's more likely that the top screen will have full-HD resolution, and that the bottom screen would have just enough to show the virtual keyboard. 800 or 640 pixels wide might be enough. In this case, the ebook mode would look just like the game mode - second screen folded to the back - but in a vertical position.

The thickness of the device is, as I mentioned, about 20 mm in the closed position. For balance reasons, the battery has to be in the bottom part. If the ebook function uses a double screen, the two halves should have 10 mm each; otherwise, the top part could be very thin, maybe just 2 or 3 mm.

In fact, the battery will take up 1/2 to 2/3 of the device thickness - current battery energy densities are still far from optimal. No doubt in 10 or 15 years, we'll have a very thin slate device, probably foldable in the middle, mostly made from graphene with an integrated supercapacitor. Such a device could be made as thin as 0.5 mm; no doubt they'll then have to fluff it up with aerogel to a thickness of 5 mm or more, or else we won't be allowed to take it on an airplane!

Also notice the iPhone-like Home button at the bottom, and the camera pinhole at the top. As I said, Apple has a patent for incorporating a camera into a screen, but this is unlikely to become reality anytime soon. For augmented reality a second camera in the bottom/back half would also be nice to have.

The mockups don't show any external connector. It will either have a small folding door like in the MacBook Air, or an iPhone-like dock connector, I think.