Solipsism Gradient

Panasonic quickly followed with the Words Gear. 1024×600 pixels at 211 dpi, half the weight of the Sony Reader, and the form factor is like a paperback with 20mm sawed off the bottom. It has an SD card slot, which is a good idea, and the design looks better; however it seems to use a standard LCD screen instead of e-paper, which means lower battery life.

So, Sony’s Reader is out. This seems to be the first e-book reader that uses electronic paper and has a chance to be more than just a brief clunky curiosity.

The specs aren’t all that good, though. On the positive side, the display has a reasonable 170 dpi (200 to 300 is considered optimal for simulating actual paper) and battery life is reasonable at 7500 page turns. On the negative side, the display shows just 800×600 pixels and the dimensions aren’t ideal – slightly larger than a standard paperback, although a little thinner. From the pictures, the lines are too short for my taste, and 4-level grayscale isn’t enough to do proper antialiasing. And $349 is a little on the expensive side. It plays MP3 files but with only 64MB of memory that’s not much use.

My ideal e-book reader would have a 200 dpi screen which reproduces exactly the printable area of a standard paperback, which would mean a screen 1200 pixels tall and 700 pixels wide. Since the device has to compete against paperbacks, dimensions, weight and (ideally) price should be very similar. The Connect Store shows weirdly mixed prices; some, around the $6 level, not totally unreasonable, while others are in hardcover range. Come on, it’s not as if e-books have to pay for all that overhead of printing, binding, distributing, shipping, remaindering, and so forth. $4 should make e-books more accessible while at the same time paying better royalties to authors.

In 1989, Ben Bova wrote Cyberbooks, a funny and prescient tale of what would happen if such a subversive device as a cybernetic book would actually be brought on the market. Well, he didn’t foresee the emergence (only a very few years later) of the tubes, erhm, Internet, but it’s still a very readable story. Needless to say it seems to have sunk with very few traces; it’s out of print and Amazon has no cover picture available, and I know nobody else who has a copy.

Coming back to the present, I believe Apple should take a shot at this device. Jonathan Ive can do a much better design than the Sony Reader with one cerebral hemisphere tied behind his back, and a 1200×700, 200 dpi screen with 16 or more gray levels will certainly leave the labs soon.

So, Zune is coming in November. Contrasting with what we’re used to get from Apple, no detailed tech specs or prices were released. The screen has the same 320×240 pixel dimensions that Apple uses, but it measures 3″ diagonal (instead of Apple’s 2.5″). That is, the pixels are 20% larger. The large photos on Microsoft’s site appear smoothed in some way, since no individual pixels can be seen.

What is known of the feature set is… interesting. AAC support, WiFi support for letting friends try out songs, and a FM radio. I suppose FM radio is still in wide use in the US, but I doubt that people will want to pay extra to have it built-in by default. Same goes for WiFi; the impact on battery life won’t be too positive, especially if it’s turned on by default. AAC support may be an effort to get people to migrate from the iPod. There seems to be no built-in recording capability.

I’ve also seen a screenshot of the Zune store. Much like the new iTunes/Store theme, it seems to have a consistent visual appearance. It’s much darker and (to my untrained eyes) more webpage-like. Curiously they use all-lowercase titles in the “source list” where Apple now uses all-uppercase. The last item (“My Zune”) is conspicuously different in that regard. The UI also wastes space on the bottom by reproducing the Zune’s buttons. I’ll be interested to see if anybody complains that this deviates from the normal Windows interface…

All in all, I don’t think Apple has much to worry about in the short term.

Rainer Brockerhoff wrote:

As I thought, Time Machine is starting to prompt manufacturers to begin offering affordable RAID backup systems…

Here’s one more such product from Maxtor. 1TB (500GB with RAID), gigabit ethernet, printer server and media server capability, all for $800. This is starting to get interesting…

So, the big announcement is past and I wasn’t too excited.

New iPods; OK; I’m still relatively satisfied with my 3G, 40GB device. The new Shuffle looks good. Finally a price point and size suitable for jogging, although I’ll probably buy it only when it grows to 2 or 4GB. The new Nanos look less scratchable now, but still, at the price points they’ll be available here for, don’t seem to be a good value for me. The large iPods do stuff I’m not interested in, like photos and video, and I suppose that they – like my current iPod – aren’t suited, speed and reliability-wise, to be used regularly as an external drive.

Games. I very rarely play any games on my Mac these days and I’ve never owned a console, so I can’t see me playing games on an iPod either. The positive part about this is that it shows that iPods are tending towards having some sort of developer API – I wonder if these were all ported in-house or if there’ll be a PodCode announced at next WWDC.

The whole movie hoopla leaves me cold. I watch almost no TV (we don’t even have cable), rent a DVD very rarely (under 10 times a year, or less), buy no DVDs, and wouldn’t know what to do with a TiVo. I suppose it’s all big news in the USA. The iTV thingy looks like it’ll boost Apple’s stock when it comes out, so I’m for it in theory…

iTunes 7 is about the only part of all this which I’ll use soon – in fact, I already gave it a try. The new UI looks quite good. All the Aqua is gone, the exception being the “traffic light” window buttons; the rest is done in muted plastic tones. Some people are decrying this as further dilution of the increasingly varied Mac OS X interface, but I’d say this is mostly dictated by iTunes unique position as a cross-platform application that looks the same on both Mac and Windows. In fact, a quick peek into the package reveals that all the UI elements are present internally – it uses no native widgets at all.

It may be subjective, or the new QuickTime decoders may have had some bits polished, but some songs sound better now. The left-hand column looks nice, though most of the items aren’t relevant to me. The two new alternate library views are somewhat wasted on me; I deliberately erase cover pictures to save on space, and this only helped me find two albums that had slipped through. I wonder whether the pictures must still be stored inside each track, and whether they still are copied to iPods that have no cover display? If so, I’ll continue avoiding them.

Finally, the iPod control screen looks good. I’ll certainly study the whole new UI to see if I glean any ideas for XRay II…

I forgot to mention that now, for the first time, all shipping Macs have at least two CPU cores. Amazing. It also leaves behind with the machines I have available for testing, namely, an iBook (G3) which can still boot 10.0, a PowerBook G4, an iMac G5, and an Intel mini (core solo). So I need a dual-core 64-bit machine to round things out… hm.

I was reading over my own last and some other opinions on the net. Seems some people are expecting an Airport Express optimized for video… I’ve never used (or even seen from close-up) an Airport Express, but I’m not sure this would be all that interesting, or even possible within the current form factor. Wouldn’t it need a DVI or at least S-Video output, meaning a reasonable video card with all the DACs etc.?

Anyway, there are two other products I’d like to see from Apple.

The first might be a RAID network/backup box, but done right. Think Xsan for the home… maybe stackable modules to add any reasonable number of drives.

The second would be something in between an iPod nano and the Airport Express. An inexpensive (under $80) local controller, with a headphone jack, plugged into AC but with an iPod-like screen and controller to allow you to stream any playlist from a central music server. There are some boxes like that on the market, but they’re expensive and more geared towards connecting to an amplifier. Instead, think of something that could be mounted on a each threadmill in a gym, or at each table in a restaurant.

Not that I think these are too likely to happen, but who knows?

Things seem to be moving along well. Here are some random observations.

As I thought, Time Machine is starting to prompt manufacturers to begin offering affordable RAID backup systems. First out there was the D-Link DNS-323, which has 2 SATA drives and a gigabit network interface, and now there’s the Iomega UltraMax (no URL yet), 2 SATA drives and USB/Firewire interface. At WWDC I actually looked for such a product but couldn’t find anything suitable; they were all too large, too expensive or both. Time Machine without RAID means putting all your backups into one basket, so expect lots of better and less expensive backup drives to show up before or at next MacWorld Expo in January 2007.

The 64-bit iMacs are just out, as well as speed-bumped Mac minis. The timing on this is significant. There’s the mysterious “showtime” event announced for Sept.12, the initial day of Apple Expo Paris – and also the final day of IBC Amsterdam, the “content creation” conference. On the end of the month Apple will be present at Photokina. Of course this means that the upgrade are not significant enough to be presented at these events; rumors are flying about what media-related products will be announced. I suppose that movie sales over the iTunes Music Store is pretty much a given, although that’d a pretty unexciting, US-centric, thing by itself.

I suppose that the putative iPhone might be counted under “media”, as everybody seems to expect a phone-capable iPod instead of a music-capable cellphone under that name. While I’m a happy owner of a 3rd-gen iPod – by coincidence bought in Paris shortly after Steve Job’s last Apple Expo keynote 3 years ago – I can’t see why I would want a cellphone built into it. Or a PDA; I bought the original Palm Pilot when it came out and couldn’t get used to that either.

Should Apple bring out a product that might be classified as a “phone”, as a stockholder I seriously hope it’s not a me-too cellphone/music player/PDA. Just look at the restrictions that have so far hampered world-wide deployment of the iTMS. Combine that with the hundreds of technical and regulatory circumstances that govern cellphones in the various countries, and it’s a recipe for disaster; just check out what happened to that Motorola/Apple phone. So, hopefully, Apple will bring out something pioneering and generally usable – perhaps involving new wireless and VoIP technologies.

The iMac announcement also has deeper meaning. With the new 64-bit chips supposedly running faster at the same price point, it’s mostly a question of chip availability to convert all the line. I seriously expect all Macs to be 64-bit capable in January. Converting the iMacs at this time also means that more developers will have extra time to port their apps, if necessary. When Leopard comes out sometime between January and March a surprising number of applications will be ready for it.

Update: Apple has patented a “multi-functional hand-held device” that purports to:

… include two or more of the following device functionalities: PDA, cell phone, music player, video player, game player, digital camera, handtop, Internet terminal [and/or] GPS or remote control.

The patent covers:

Touch Screen, Touch Sensitive Housing, Display Actuator, Multi-Functionality, Form Factor, One-Handed vs. Two-Handed Operation, Footprint/Size, Full Screen Display, Limited Number of Mechanical Actuators, Adaptability, GUI Based on Functionality, Switching Between Devices (GUI), Operating at Least Two Functionalities Simultaneously, Configurable GUI (User Preferences), Input Devices, Pressure or Force Sensing Devices, Force Sensitive Housing, Motion Actuated Input Device, Mechanical Actuators, Microphone, Image Sensor, Touch Gestures, 3-D Spatial Gestures, Perform Action Based on Multiple Inputs, Differentiating Between Light and Hard Touches, Example of a New Touch Vocabulary, Speaker, Audio/Tactile Feedback Devices, Communication Devices (wired & wireless) and Change UI Based on Received Communication Signals.

…all that’s missing is a biological signal sensor and a recreational pharmaceutical dispensing device, to make this the functional equivalent of the “Joymaker” Frederik Pohl wrote about in his 1965 book The Age of the Pussyfoot. I wonder if that counts as “prior art”…?

So, I’m just back from getting my WWDC badge. I’ve seen the famous banner and all icons on it are known – the only one I had doubts on (above the SpotLight icon) is supposedly from a Mac OS X Server utility. Even the 64-Bit icon was previously used when the G5 came out. Ah right, we now know what the Leopard “Big X” looks like – black with a white border. Drat, I need to change the XRay II icon to reflect that…

The relative sizes and positions give no hints. There are a few hardware icons. One iPod Nano. 3 iMacs, 2 laptops and one desktop – the latter one from the side, so the front may be different. Or the banner might just be there as a misdirection and may be changed on Thursday… the Xcode icon is very large – so large that one can read the small print on it, but then it’s a developer’s conference. On the other hand, people “in the know” did tell me to make sure not to miss the developer tools sessions.

Certainly a major release of Xcode is in the works. 2.5 or 3.0, it doesn’t matter, but my personal hunch is that the superannuated Interface Builder application will be phased out and integrated into Xcode. Let’s hope that connections like outlets and bindings will be easier to visualize and debug, and that the IBPalette interface is finally officialized so that we can write non-trivial palettes.

I’ll be under NDA for details – things announced at the keynote excepted – so these will be my final pre-WWDC speculations. On the hardware front, 64-Bits is of course guaranteed, with one of the new “Core 2 Duo” chips. A Mac Pro will certainly be out, although the name may not be exact, and the casing will probably be a minor variation on the current one. There’s a good Ars Technica writeup about the new Intel CPUs, and expectations are that the whole new range will fit nicely into the spectrum from MacBook Pros to the Mac Pros – possibly with a dual-core, dual-CPU at the top, although it might also be that Intel has been reserving their quad-core chip for Apple to announce. Intel Xserves might also appear.

I don’t expect a new iPod to be announced in a big way, except as a footnote to the usual summing-up of past sales; at a developer’s conference, it’ll be big news only if it had an official API for developers to extend its functionality, which might actually be a neat way for Apple start a new iPod generation in a privileged position; stranger things have happened.

I’m reasonably certain that we’ll each get a Leopard preview DVD. I’ve seen rumors of changes to applications, which I consider less interesting as they’re not really a part of the OS itself, at least from my developer’s standpoint. I use relatively few of the iApps every day – Safari and iChat are the ones I leave open, and my wishlist for those is small.

Real Leopard features I expect to see:

– RBSplitView adopted! Well, not likely, but it’d be nice… I’ve told Apple I’d gladly give them the code, anyway.

– A new UI theme, or at least a migration of the default windows theme to the new “cool gradient/smooth metal” look.

– Some new Cocoa widgets, especially the more successful ones from the Tiger iApps. I hope to see them do Brent Simmon’s “big time tabs control”; I need it badly for XRay II.

– A new Finder. I’ve mostly gotten used to the old one, but still…

– Resolution independence. We need to get away from the pre-rendered bitmap widgets. People are already starting to use object-based PDF files for that, but they’re a pain to make and don’t look good at all resolutions. My ideal solution here would be a new NSImageRep and corresponding file format that would do for images what the TrueType format did for fonts: resolution-independence with special hinting for small sizes.

– More extensions to Objective-C. Garbage collection should be a given. Unloading NSBundles is supposed to be in the works. Frameworks included inside applications can’t be easily updated and versioning is pretty much useless for practical purposes.

– Hopefully we’ll see expanded metadata capabilities and a more useable SpotLight. I hardly use it in Tiger because it’s so slow and limited. The ability to have additional named forks should go hand-in-hand with full NTFS support. Other file systems would also be nice (ZFS, anyone?).

– Virtualization. I’ve written about this several times. My personal opinion is that Apple should write a fully trusted hypervisor into the EFI (using the TPM) and run everything inside virtual machines, including Mac OS X for Intel itself. Booting some version of Windows into a second VM would be easy, then, and there wouldn’t be a full version of Mac OS X for Intel for people to run on standard PCs either. I don’t think dual-booting is a good solution, I believe Apple was just testing the waters with BootCamp. No idea what would happen to Parallels in this scenario; they might be bought out by Apple, or by Microsoft, I suppose. Here are more thoughts on virtualization from Daniel Jalkut and Paul Kafasis.

– 64-bit “cleanness”. Meaning, Carbon and Cocoa and everything else running in 64-bit apps. And very probably, also, on the G5s. However, I’m not sure (and no time to research at this moment) how mixing 32 and 64 bits works on the Intel CPUs. I remember reading somewhere that it’s not as easy as it is on the G5, where you can have 32-bit processes co-existing with 64-bit processes.

Unlikely or even impossible:

– A new kernel.

– iPhone, iPDA, iGame, iTablet. iAnything in fact. There are rumors about VoIP support and there might be some sort of hardware for that, but I can’t see Apple doing a me-too cellphone.

– Some goodie under the seat (like when the iSight was introduced, which I missed out on, argh!).

In the meantime, I’d better get back to my coding… more after the keynote!