Solipsism Gradient

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 (1280×720 at 200ppi) will probably set the device’s price too high, or they’d have to go down to 1024×576 at 160 dpi, or even 800×450 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.

Here’s some wild speculation about the supposedly-soon-to-be-announced Apple Tablet. Rumors are flying fast and furious but all agree that the device will be based on a 9.7″ (or 10″) screen.

A week ago I saw compelling arguments that the Rumored Apple Tablet Is a Train Wreck. The article is quite logical: if Apple builds a touch tablet based on a 10″ screen, it will probably fail. It would be too large to use like an iPhone, holding it in one hand and touching with the other, and too large to carry in a pocket. It would also have to be relatively thick (and therefore, heavy) to protect the screen. Lying flat on a desk, the screen would be at a disadvantageous angle. In other words, it would be a keyboardless netbook; not Apple’s style at all. See the Amtek for an example of this.

Note that the word “tablet” is already too connected, in people’s minds, with certain features. I’m not sure what this new Apple device should be called; in fact, I hope that Apple avoids this designation entirely. I do think that it will, at least for its first generation, be primarily an entertainment device. More built for travel or leisure than for work, in other words.

Let’s look first at the constraints that Apple probably sees in such a device. First of all, they will want to avoid overlapping features with the existing product lines (or, at least, with where they’ll be taking these lines in the near future). So, the new device won’t have any direct phone functionality. It will of course play from a music library, as all Apple products do, but it’ll be too large to work as an iPod does. On the other side, it can’t compete with the low end of Apple’s laptops; this rules out running Mac OS X and/or having an arbitrary number of applications running simultaneously.

I see four basic applications for the new device: ebook reading, game playing, single-foreground apps like web browsing, and, perhaps, data entry. Current AppStore applications can do all of that to some extent, but are limited by the iPhone/iPod Touch’s small screen and puny input resources. So the new device needs a larger screen with full touch capabilities; 1280×720 pixels is necessary for HD movies, would be excellent for games, and reasonable for other applications. The screen would have to be thin, fast, brightly colored, and low-power. OLEDs seem to be the only technology available today that fits these requirements.

A 10″ OLED screen would have a pixel density of about 145 ppi. For comparison, a MacBook Air’s screen is 100 ppi, while the iPhone’s screen is 160 ppi. However, a serious issue with such dense screens is fabrication yield – the percentage of built screens that pass factory testing without too many defective pixels. Another problem with a single 10″ screen would be that a sizable portion of it will be taken up by a virtual keyboard or some other input control. A physical keyboard would make the device a small laptop and therefore is out of the question. Finally, the applications I listed above demand differing orientations of the device: horizontal for movies and games, vertical for ebooks.

One way of solving these problems is to use a clamshell-like design, but with two screens – more like a Nintendo DS than a netbook (this is also suggested by the “train wreck” author). Won’t two screens make it more expensive? Not at all, because of the yield problem, two smaller screens will probably cost 50% to 70% of a large screen. Making a 1280×720 screen at 200 ppi should be possible, giving a screen size 6.4″ by 3.6″ – about 163x92mm (roughly 7″ diagonal). With the same dimensions at 160 ppi, the screen would be 1024×576 pixels, keeping the 16:9 aspect ratio but sacrificing full HD capability.

So what’s near these dimensions? Well… I have here the paperback edition of “Cyberbooks” by Ben Bova (Jan.1990). It’s a quite funny story, but sadly out of print; the cyberbook’s inventor struggles against resistance by the entrenched publishing industry (hah!). This book is 178mm high, 101mm wide, and 20mm thick; easy to carry and to read.

And by a coincidence, these measures are only a few mm larger than the screen size I calculated above. So, for now, let’s assume a paperback-size device. I guess I should say mass-market-paperback-sized, as now there are these pesky “trade paperbacks”, which are not too well standardized, more expensive, and make me build my bookshelves larger than I want to – but I digress.

OK, let’s postulate a small book-sized device that opens in the middle. Each half measures 178x101x10mm, and the hinge is constructed to lock at certain angles. By the way, these are rectangular slabs with black glass on the screen side and Apple’s aluminum unibody elsewhere; the edges have to be rounded, but not much. The 10mm thickness is constrained mostly by battery capacity. Assuming the unibody back-wall to be 1mm, and the touchscreen to use up 2mm, we’ll have 6 to 7mm inside for a battery in one of the halves (the other half will contain the electronics). Apple’s new Li-polymer technology should allow for a 20 Watt-hour battery with these dimensions, by my rough calculations.

OLED screens have very variable power consumption; almost zero for black, maximum for white. Let’s estimate an average of 2W for each panel, and 3W for the electronics. This gives us a battery life of 3 hours when using both screens. If you play a movie on only one screen, this would go up to 4 hours; not too bad for a first-generation device. How would our applications work on this form factor?

Ebook reading: there are two options here, holding the “book” vertically as usual. Either we open the device 180 degrees, showing two pages, or we fold the right-hand screen completely behind the device. The second option is more likely, as only one screen would be active (reducing power consumption). Only the book application would be in the foreground.

Game playing: hold the device horizontally in both hands, with the bottom screen folded behind the device. Gameplay would be controlled with all 10 fingers (note that Apple has a patent for a touchscreen in the back of such a device). The back screen would be turned off to conserve power. Only the game application would be in the foreground.

Movie watching: this too is horizontal. The lower screen could be folded behind, as in the previous scenarios, or with the hinge locked at 110° as in a laptop, for sitting on a table. This would be stable as the bottom screen would be the one with the battery, which would be 2/3 of the device’s weight. Only the movieplayer application would be in the foreground.

Web browsing, or similar apps: two options. Horizontally, locked at 110°, the upright screen would show that foreground application, while the bottom screen would show the virtual keyboard, controls, and some status indicators. Vertically, with the device locked at 180 degrees, and joining the two screens into one – basically turning it into a classic tablet/netbook.

The 180 degree netbook mode is the one that has serious drawbacks. The hinge should bring the two screen halves together with a very small seam; tricky to implement, and making the screen edges sharper and more fragile. It also means that both screens would work at full brightness, raising power consumption. If the two screens are always separate, the lower/right one would be used only for virtual input – some bright pixels but a mostly black background, and then it could also have lower resolution – perhaps only half that of the main screen, lowering both costs and power needs.

Also notice that in all cases, there’ll be a single foreground app using the entire screen, and perhaps small widgets or background app icons on the “keyboard” screens. This also means that the device will run a version of OS X – no Mac-style interface, since that is very much tied to a mouse-type input device.

Further hardware refinements are possible. Apple has a patent on interleaving a camera with screen pixels. Doing that on both screens might be too expensive, but doing it on the screen that folds to the back might be just the thing for “augmented reality” applications. Haptic feedback? I don’t think there’s anything like that on the market yet. Voice input and stylus/handwriting input should be easy to do. An iPhone-style connector would be the minimum external interface (plus the usual audio connectors). Accelerometers, compass, GPS etc. will be built-in; an SD slot probably too.

Other details. The device will have any or all of the usual wireless connections – WiFi, WiMax, Bluetooth, 3G – but no direct phone capability. 32GB SSD storage would be a minimum. This will probably be the cue to roll out a CPU based on a P. A. Semi design; should it run the ARM instruction set, we’ll probably see current AppStore apps running in a compatibility box. In any event, Apple’s new Clang compiler technology means that supporting a new CPU architecture should be a piece of cake.

With all that, my tip would be a price in the $899-$999 range; rumors hint at a September 15th introduction, with availability sometime around the end of November. Will we see all of this in the first-generation device? Time will tell.

Ted Landau of MacFixit fame interviewed me last Wednesday and the interview is up now on the Mac Observer. Many thanks to Ted for this opportunity to get word out about the upcoming Quay plug-in SDK.

A few small corrections:

…I also had a job working with the Macs installed at a medical equipment company…

what I said was that, at that company, I designed medical equipment based on a Mac-like architecture (68K processor and all) and used a Mac as a development workstation.

…The staff here at the WWDC have always been helpful, although probably a bit more so back in the 1990’s than now…

I actually was referring to the people at developer relations, not at WWDC, and the situation is reversed; they’re a bit more helpful now, since in the 1990’s they hadn’t quite gotten their international act together, and I depended more on personal acquaintance with some of the Apple folks.

The conference will be over tomorrow and I’m quite satisfied with the outcome. Now for some comments about the announcements and (NDA permitting) about what I learned.

I had some vague idea of going to some iPhone sessions and letting presenters (or friends developing for the iPhone) convince me that I should start developing for it. No such thing happened; session overlap was so severe, and there were so many labs to go to, and people to talk to, that I skipped any non-Mac session or discussion. What little I heard in the corridors confirmed my notion that the current state of iPhone development and the AppStore deviates too far from my preferred position as a utility developer – a niche Apple still keeps closed on the iPhone. Maybe when the tablet comes out…

Speaking of tablets, while everybody agrees that one is in the works, it seems to be a year or so away from announcement. (Ditto for the new CPUs I hinted at, in my last post.)

Snow Leopard is the small new thing. Small for the user in a sense; it’s just refinements and greater speed. For developers, though, it’s the BIG new thing. And, as variously described as early as a year ago (can’t find URLs right now), much of the new stuff is driven behind the scenes by open-source projects Apple is driving: the Clang compiler, the LLVM back end, and the technologies made possible by Grand Central Dispatch, blocks and OpenCL. So, most of the sessions either expanded on this directly or offhandedly mentioned “there’s an API for that now – and it’s fully XYZ-enabled” (insert one of the technologies above).

These things have become possible because CPU chips had run into a clock frequency “sound barrier”; 3GHz is about the maximum current silicon can do without extensive and expensive cooling or exotic technology. So multicore has become the solution du jour: all Apple computers now have at least 2 core, and the top machine has 8 (16 virtual). Expect that number to double every 2 years, at least.

But for years multi-processor machines were hard to program. About 14 years ago, at another WWDC I bought a Genesis MP 528: this Mac clone had 4 PowerPC 604 processors running at a blistering 132MHz. It didn’t have much caching on those chips, and only Photoshop and a few other specialized apps could see more than one CPU, and that only for image filters. In two years the first PowerPC G3 CPU card, with a single processor but caching, running at 300MHz, had about the same Photoshop performance – and that performance was then available to all apps. So why didn’t more apps take advantage of the 4 CPUs? The classic Mac System 7 (to 9) had no easy way to allow for this; there was a very primitive multiprocessing API but the system was pretty much locked out of it.

As said in the keynote, Snow Leopard will support only Intel Macs; PowerPC Macs are, therefore, stuck in the Leopard era, and only some few bug fixes will appear on 10.5, then it’s over. I couldn’t find hard figures comparing the installed base; I’ve seen percentages quoted of between 10 and 35% of Macs Macs still in use being PowerPCs. I personally didn’t think this would dip below 25% before 2011; then again, as a stockholder, I’m glad Apple sold so many new Macs recently…

Some people question why PowerPC users will be left out of the Snow Leopard advantages, and I think I know why. While the top 4-CPU PowerPC machines still can hold their own with more modern machines under certain circumstances, the vast majority of PowerPC Macs have only 1 CPU; only a few big desktops have 2, and even fewer have 4. Most advantages of Snow Leopard come into play when you have at least 2 CPU cores, and there’s serious testing and bug fixing to be done for supporting an entire architecture. Apple probably just weighed those factors (with better numbers than I have available) and decided it wouldn’t work out.

Positives of the new Clang/LLVM combo: better compiler speed, better code optimization – both still starting out but they’ve more power in reserve, while the current gcc compiler and backends are pretty much maxed out; way better error messages, the Clang static analyzer is just awesome (a word I usually hesitate to use, but this really is!); lots of goodies to come from tighter integration with Xcode. Negatives: may still generate wrong/inefficient code in some circumstances; no C++ support yet (I don’t care myself about this one).

A sleeper advantage is, also, that the intermediate (LLVM) bytecode generated by Clang could possibly be stored as such inside executables, and be just-in-time compiled for execution on any target CPU. In other words, the same executable could run on a new machine Apple puts out, even if it has a new CPU chip/architecture, as long as the JIT compiler is in place for that; application developers wouldn’t have know (or care).

Regarding blocks (or “closures”, as they’re known in other places), they’re a syntactic convenience for programmers to pass executable code as data. As such, they make programs more readable. What makes them inordinately powerful in Snow Leopard is that they’re also the basic executable units for all of the cool new multiprocessing stuff in Grand Central Dispatch. Therefore, with a little discipline, it becomes easy for developers to chop up tasks into little slices than can be executed in parallel by however many CPU cores (or, with OpenCL, GPU units) are available to do them; and for the first time anywhere I know of, this facility is available throughout the system, even at a quite low level.

So, am I running off to convert all of my code to the new technologies? Well, yes and no. Many things still have to be done in a serial manner, and the system will do others in parallel behind my back. Also, it seems that writing a generic application that runs on both 10.5 and 10.6 (using the new stuff) is tricky; I’m still investigating how to best do it. Stay tuned for developments…

So much for regular posting; either no connection, or too much to do when I have one.

Still, everything else’s been good so far. The weather’s been quite good for San Francisco, though a little windy at times. I met a lot of old and new friends already and took some more nice pictures of downtown San Francisco.

In a couple of hours I’ll be in the WWDC keynote queue. Most speculation I’ve read so far has been about iPhone hardware/software, which I’m not too interested in. However, one nice rumor I’ve heard is that they may unveil a highly scalable CPU from the PA Semi group Apple acquired a year or so ago; one or two such chips could power the iPhone, with (say) 32 in a laptop, 128 in a desktop, and 8 or 16 in a hypothetical tablet. Will a tablet be announced? No idea, though I hope so.

Regarding Snow Leopard, I think the most likely announcement is going to be about price and availability; my tip would be between $39 and $59, and September/October. The rumored “Marble” interface theme sounds unlikely to me.

That said, I’m very excited about the things in Snow Leopard’s underlying technologies, but those are visible only to developers, anyway. (Also: NDA…)

At first I thought I wouldn’t make it, but now I’m very happy to announce that I’m going to WWDC 2009.

I’ll arrive in San Francisco around noon on June 4th (Thursday), and will leave, also around noon, on June 16th (Tuesday). I’ll be glad to meet with anyone who’s interested…

More as it happens!

While most of yesterday’s Macworld keynote was uninteresting to me personally – I rarely use any of the updated software, and don’t have iTunes store access – the new 17″ MacBook Pro was mostly as I expected: the additional space was used for a larger battery, and more USB ports.

It was gratifying to see Apple’s battery page practically repeat my reasoning about the infrastructure (and wasted space) needed to accommodate removable batteries. (See also Chuq Von Rospach‘s discussion of the issue.) Not that the 15″ model’s infrastructure is quite as large as they show in the video, of course… but it makes the point well.

Judging from the pictures, the hard drive is inside a space that’s almost exactly square. In theory, they could have rotated the drive 90 degrees and made the battery 30mm wider, for maybe 10% more capacity. So why didn’t they do that? It would have meant extra weight, a beefed-up charging circuit, more heat dissipation, and either a larger power supply (which already is at 85W) or a longer charging time.

I don’t doubt that we’ll see incremental upgrades for iMacs and Mac minis rolled out without much fanfare over the next two months. My tip for the iMacs is that they’ll use the exact same front and back bezels as the corresponding-sized displays, with only a 10mm shim module inserted to accommodate the CPU and drives. The advantage, of course, would be that you could add a second display to your iMac with the exact same styling, screen parameters, and height; a good selling point. It would be a no-brainer for the 24″ model. I’m not sure that a 20″ display from Apple would sell well by itself, but if it used bezels and nearly all components from the 20″ iMac, it might be price competitive, and the styling advantage would be worth paying a few bucks extra. A 28″ iMac has been rumored; would that, then, mean that the current high-end 30″ display would be shrunk to 28″ too? I hope we’ll have the answer soon.

It’s been a couple of weeks since my last post, but I haven’t been idle. Well, a few of the holidays excepted, of course. Here’s what’s on my radar for the new year, or at least for the first months.

I’ve finally had time to look at the SnowLeopard (Mac OS X 10.6) beta. Can’t say much about it, except that there are interesting and significant changes in the infrastructure – important for programmers. I really hope that, once out, a majority of users will adopt it.

A consequence of seeing the 10.6 APIs is that I decided to do a serious rework of Klicko and Quay, so they’ll be ultimately easier to migrate to 10.6 and a 64-bit environment. Klicko inherited a lot of code, and I’m really glad that I decided to do it as a training exercise, since I’ll very soon back-port much of that back to Quay, after enhancing and optimizing.

If all goes well, Klicko 1.1 will be out soon. I’ve got all but installation and updating procedures done. Most notably, it’s now a System Preferences panel that installs a background process. While this is a departure from the easy-to-run, simple-Cocoa-app mantra, splitting this type of application into a faceless background process and a foreground GUI will soon be mandatory for all practical purposes, and there are advantages; for the user, once properly installed and configured, Klicko will “just work” automatically and in the background, and use very few resources.

One new Klicko feature was requested by several users (and others who have emailed me in the past). There will be a (configurable) preference to have the window’s “zoom” button do a true maximize – or at least attempt to, not all applications will support it properly. While I find the importance that Windows users attach to maximizing everything all the time a little puzzling, trying it out convinced me that it’s useful now and then. I always maximize NetNewsWire, Xcode, and a few other application windows, for instance. I also decided that it may be useful in pointing users that are new to the Mac to shareware software in general and to my own applications.

Once that is done – hopefully with very few build updates – it’s back to reimplementing everything I learned into Quay (probably 1.2). I’m not decided whether that will become a preferences panel too, but it may be possible. More importantly, I’m now pretty fluent with the event tap and accessibility APIs that both Quay and Klicko use.

The major new feature of Quay will be that Quay menus will also pop up for Finder icons. Ultimately, I’d like to make this work in any and all Finder window modes – icon, list and column – and in all circumstances where the Finder’s own contextual menus pop up. I’ve done some preliminary testing and it looks like it might be possible. There are a few edge cases where I’m not sure that I’ll be able to compute the correct path for the icon.

Anyway, if all works as planned, I’ll be able to introduce more flexibility through plug-ins. A plug-in would get a file or folder handed to it and would produce either a popup menu, or an information window. This would allow me to finally declare XRay entirely defunct (it already runs very poorly on Leopard), and replace it with many small, specialized plug-ins. My older contextual menu plug-ins, like Zingg! and Nudge would also be trivial to rewrite as Quay plug-ins.

A similar, much more ambitious plug-in scheme, was planned for XRay II, and I can reuse some of that code… there are still some complex issues to decide, however. Opening the plug-in interface to other developers is of course what I’d like to do, but licensing, updating, keeping plug-ins from interfering with each other will be very tricky.

All in all there’s lots of ideas to implement and this should keep me busy for most of the year. I’m not considering going into iPhone/iPod development for now; there’s a glut of $0.99 applications and the way the App Store is working seems overly opaque to me.

More soon! Stay tuned.