Tripod mounts for iPhone 4?

Anyone out there? Hello? Seriously, what's wrong with the world?

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Does Tim Cook's "netbooks not computers" angle foreshadow jumbo iPod touch?

Tim Cook spoke about netbooks at Apple's latest earnings call.

Quoted all over the web, his comments are as follows:

For us, it's about doing great products. When look at netbook, cramped keyboard, terrible software, junky hardware, very small screens, just not a consumer experience. Not something that we would put the Mac brand on, quite frankly. It's not a space, as it exists today, that we're interested in or that customers will be interested in long term. But do look at the space and see how customers respond to it. People who want a small computer that does browsing and email might want to buy an iPod touch or an iPhone.

If we find a way that we can deliver an innovative product that really makes a contribution, then we will do that. We have some interesting ideas in this space. Product pipeline is fantastic for Mac. 17 out of last 18 quarters, have exceeded market rate of growth. Quite an accomplishment in this quarter, especially when compared to very low-priced netbooks "that I think it's a stretch to call them a personal computer" which are propping up industry.

OK, what's the take home message here? Allow me to translate it from Applespeak for you.

1. Netbooks have small screens and cramped keyboards, which we don't like.
2. We won't make netbooks, we're filling that space with the iPhone and the iPod touch.
3. We will attack that segment with something else too (unless Steve cancels it).
4. Netbooks aren't personal computers.

Okay, numbers two and three are easy. (Why am I so sure about three? Well, I think Tim Cook goes the closest possible here to announcing future products without actually doing so. Compare this to how Peter Oppenheimer confirmed the iPhone one year before its launch by saying as little as "we're not sitting around doing nothing.")

But how about one and four? I think the real hidden messages are buried in those two.

So netbooks have small screens and cramped keyboards. Of course: that's how big they are! Obviously, a 14" netbook wouldn't be much of a netbook now, would it?

So how to make a netbook-like device that doesn't have a small screen or a cramped keyboard, while keeping it small?

Easy. By making it an oversized iPhone. An Apple tablet. The whole thing will be a screen, and a touchscreen at that, with the possibility of showing on-screen keyboards.

And finally, what about the "not a personal computer" comment?

It's obviously bullshit, for one. Why wouldn't a device with PC hardware (matching the capabilities of a top laptop from a few years back), running a full-blown PC operating system, be a personal computer?

Commenting the earnings call, Jason Snell sees it this way:

Boom! Tim Cook destroys the Netbook world again. "I think it's a stretch to call it a personal computer." Ouch. They've said much of this before, but it's very clear that Apple wants us to know that they're looking at this category and have some ideas... just nothing to announce today.

Well, I beg to differ. Not about the fact that Apple has some ideas, no. But I don't think Tim's comments were meant to belittle the netbook sector. No, I think what he's trying to say is something like this:

What we're going to release in that sector won't be a Mac, it won't be a real personal computer. And I know people will whine about that, comparing our product to netbooks, which are PCs. However, if we keep repeating that netbooks aren't PCs, it might actually start looking true, so people will stop whining.

So there you have it. A tablet device is coming, and it won't be a Mac. It couldn't be: if it were, people would start running all sorts of Mac software on it, and most of it would run very poorly on such an underpowered little thing.

So it will be something based on the iPhone OS. Hopefully, with enhanced functionality, though. Multiple apps, a true file system, saving documents, menus, windows, and so on... The possibilities (and the questions) are legion.

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Questioning Tog: Does the Mouse Really Rule?

Did you hear this one? According to Tog, the keyboard feels faster than the mouse, but it's actually slower. (This came via Tim Bray and John Gruber).

Tog says Apple spent $50 million on user interface related R&D by 1989, and learned, among (hopefully numerous) other things, that:

• Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.
• The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.

Tog's explanation: using the mouse is easy and boring, so it feels slower than recalling keyboard shortcuts, even though "the stopwatch will tell you" that it's actually faster.

No matter how many times I've read this very general statement, it never sounded right to me. Nobody seemed to ever mention any details. When I finally took the plunge and read Tog's actual analysis (parts 1, 2 and 3), I found out that the details still weren't there.

I would really like to know the answers to the following questions, for example:

1. How many different functions did the subjects have to perform in these tests?
2. What exactly did accomplishing a task by "mousing" and by "keyboarding" involve?
3. How many key combinations did the user have to remember for a test? How difficult were these key combinations to enter? How easy were they to remember?
4. How many mouse targets needed to be acquired, how big were they, and how far apart were they positioned?
5. Did the users have any previous experience with acquiring similar mouse targets to those featured in the test?
6. Did the users have any previous experience with using similar (or identical) keyboard combinations to those in the test?
7. Was the user manipulating an object (like a text box or an image) between these "tasks"? If so, how big was the visual representation of this object? Did the user have to return to the object after acquiring the target needed for the task? If so, was it also timed?

I think Tog's "mousing is faster than keyboarding" statement is akin to saying that "walking is faster than driving," and neglecting to mention whether you were running your tests on a speedway or in a staircase.


Tog's test revisited

Tog does provide us, though, some insight into the methodology of at least one of his tests in the third part of his discussion:

The test I did I did several years ago, frankly, I entered into for the express purpose of letting cursor keys win, just to prove they could in some cases be faster than the mouse. Using Microsoft Word on a Macintosh, I typed in a paragraph of text, then replaced every instance of an "e" with a vertical bar (|). The test subject's task was to replace every | with an "e." Just to make it even harder, the test subjects, when using the mouse, were forbidden to just drop the cursor to the right of the | and then use the delete key to get rid of it. Instead, they had to actually drag the mouse pointer across the one-pixel width of the character t o select it, then press the "e" key to replace it.

The average time for the cursor keys was 99.43 seconds, for the mouse, 50.22 seconds. I also asked the test subjects which method was faster, and to a person they reported that the cursor keys were much, much faster. This was a classic example of the difference between subjective time (the passage of time the user experiences) and objective time (the passage of time the clock experiences). Put simply, the more mentally engaging the task, the shorter the time appears.

While I'm not a user interface expert, this passage leaves me scratching my head. It does seem to prove an interesting point on perception vs. reality, but it definitely fails to prove that the mouse is faster in general.

All it proves is that acquiring targets (vertical bar characters) scattered over a large area of the screen is more efficient with the mouse than with the keyboard. As we'll see in a minute, moving to smaller distances (especially single steps) would be much easier with the keyboard.

The same way, if you need to pick up 20 parcels which are miles apart, you'll probably take a car or a bike, but not if the same parcels are placed on the first 20 steps of a staircase.

As the vertical bars can be pretty far from each other, moving your pointer between them constitutes a significant part of the test, so it should favor the mouse, the faster vehicle – so I thought. But when I ran the test* on myself as a (somewhat questionable) test subject, using TextEdit and a paragraph from an Ask Tog article, I got the following results:

• Mouse: 143 s
• Keyboard: 133.5 s

I simply kept pressing the right arrow key until a vertical bar came up, at which point I selected it using Shift-Right arrow, and replaced it by pressing the "e" key. Surprisingly, and contrary to Tog's data, it was actually the keyboard that turned out to be marginally faster in this test.

By the way, having performed this test, I really fail to see how much it has to do with what Tog calls the "high-level cognitive function" of deciding "upon which special-function key to press." Maybe I'm really smart, but I didn't find that holding down an arrow key would tax my cognitive capabilities that much.

I also noticed how unnatural it felt to be using the mouse for the task. I was struggling to exert the right amount of force needed for precision alignment. It felt unbelievably tedious and even physically painful – my right wrist actually hurt afterwards. (Could all this suffering be another reason why using the mouse for the task seems longer than it actually is?)

*These test results are meant to serve little more than entertainment purposes. One (biased) subject, who happens to be the same person who devised the test, is less than statistically convincing. Yet I've made efforts to make these tests as meaningful as possible. I performed every task several times, and averaged the results. When I felt that fatigue, proficiency achieved by practice, or other factors interfered with my results, I kept re-doing the tests, switching their order, and sometimes taking long breaks from them, until I found that my results stabilized around a value, and that any difference between the values I got for the two or three tasks I was comparing was representative rather than accidental. I also honestly tried to achieve a reasonably good score in each test, without going into extremes. (I basically pretended that I had to perform actual work, in an office setting, on a looming deadline. I'm an average typist, and a power mouse user, having spent a decade working in Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Final Cut Pro, all particularly mouse-heavy applications.)


The mouse fights back

It occurred to me later that my results may have been affected by the font size I happened to be using. It was 13 points (Verdana) on a 17" screen at a 1440 x 900 resolution; Tog might have used a larger font and/or a smaller screen resolution almost two decades earlier.

Sure enough, setting the font size to 22 points turned the results around, improving the speed of the mouse by a large margin, and letting it score a narrow victory over the keyboard (though nothing like the double speed that Tog reported). Keyboard times also improved a bit:

• Mouse, large font: 113 s
• Keyboard, large font: 122.5 s

So Tog seems to have neglected a very important factor in his keyboard vs. mouse test: font size. Larger mouse targets are obviously easier to acquire, so the point size of the text you're editing can decide which method is better or more efficient.

That got me curious. What happens if we increase the font size to a ridiculous 200 points? I found out that the difference between the mouse and the keyboard almost disappeared in this dreadfully impossible task. In addition, the test results varied greatly, and repeating the test again and again helped improve times by leaps and bounds as I learned new tricks on the way. The keyboard started to win again, though mouse performance improved by a small margin every time I repeated the test. I averaged the results when I felt that the curve of the mouse improvements was flattening out:

• Mouse, huge font: 155.5 s
• Keyboard, huge font: 133 s

Beating the test

But there's more. Trying to speed up my "keyboarding," I tried the Alt-Right Arrow key combination, which jumps one whole word ahead, making navigation faster – and stumbled upon a "cheat": TextEdit considers the vertical bar a word boundary, thus whenever one shows up, Alt-Right arrow will stop the pointer right before it. Using this cheat (which involved more cognitive brain functionality, as well as some keyboard acrobatics), I needed more concentration than before, so the task felt much more difficult, and I also had to stop and correct some errors (something I didn't have to do using the other two methods). However, it cut my keyboarding time by a fourth, beating the hell out of the mouse at both normal and large font sizes:

• Keyboard "cheat," normal font: 95.5 s
• Keyboard "cheat," large font: 94.5 s

Noticeably, increasing the font size did nothing here. My theory is that finding each vertical line character was somewhat automatized by the cheat, so better visibility wasn't much help.

One side effect of the cheat was that I ended up inadvertently typing a lot of uppercase "E"s. I think the reasons are that here (1) I had to use two modifier keys (Alt and Shift), (2) I had to switch between them pretty fast, and (3) almost every second navigational keystroke (i.e. Alt-Arrow) was followed by a selection (Shift-Arrow), then immediately by a replacement ("e") keystroke, requiring me to switch between three different key commands very often, making me mess up one of them a lot.

Using a huge font size slowed down this task as well, but it was still the fastest way at that size:

• Keyboard "cheat," huge font: 123 s

The table and graph below summarize how the font size change affects the three input methods tested. The straight lines connecting the dots should by no way be interpreted as implying continuity, they are provided mostly for better visibility (and as hints at very vague trends).

I could come up with several pages' worth of analysis, comparing and contrasting how font size affects each test case, but suffice it to say that without specifying everything down to the smallest details, it's just about impossible to decide whether the keyboard or the mouse is faster even in a very simple test like this. Tog seems to have oversimplified things a lot.



The keyboard's turn

In order to investigate things a bit further, I also came up with a test of my own, one where I felt the keyboard would have the edge, as it required smaller, more precise navigational movements.

In my test, the subject needed to replace every second letter of every word in a (much shorter) paragraph with the letter "p." I was the test subject again, and these were my results:

• Mouse, normal font: 137 s
• Keyboard, normal font: 90 s

• Mouse, large font: 118 s
• Keyboard, large font: 76.5 s

Boy, did I manage to contrive a test that favors the keyboard! As expected, it performed better as a means for selecting every second character of a word. Rhythmically pushing the right arrow twice would always do the trick, whereas with the mouse, I had to move past small characters of varying width*, and had to strain myself to position the pointer accurately. It seemed unnatural.

Replacing the letters was identical in both cases, so it didn't influence the results. (Or did it? We'll get back to that very soon.)

Somewhat surprisingly, a larger font size helped both tasks equally well. I expected mousing to benefit more, as the targets became larger, thus easier to acquire. Investigating the reason for this anomaly is beyond the scope of my blog post, but it, again, proves my main point: that things are complicated.

If you think by now that I'm some sort of a keyboard evangelist and mouse hater, rigging tests so that they will always let the keyboard win, then well, you've got that mouse pointer hovering over the wrong guy. No, I'm the guy who keeps rigging tests in small ways that change the results in big ways, trying to show that simplistic statements like Tog's are simply wrong. And ultimately, I just want the help the case of redundancy and freedom of user choice in user interface design.

So then I changed a little aspect of my test: instead of the letter "p," the subject now had to enter the "¶" character in place of every second letter of every word. This turned the test on its head, making the previously victorious keyboard lose by a Tog-uesque 50% margin.

What gives? Well, it's simple. While the subject (i.e. yours truly) could easily rest his fingers on the "p" key while navigating with the keyboard in the previous version, that was no longer possible with the hard-to-reach Alt-"7" combination needed for the "¶" character. Thus, every time I had to switch between entering that symbol and navigating/selecting, I had to lift my fingers off the keyboard and reposition them, losing a lot of time. (With practice, my times improved greatly. From an initial dysmal 184 seconds, which I excluded from my calculations as an anomaly, I reached a much more respectable average of 149 seconds by the time I finally decided to give the whole frustrating mess a rest. As always, the number I provide is an average. However, an interesting trend to note is that this is an initially huge margin that gets significantly smaller with practice.)

• Mouse, large font: 126 s
• Keyboard, large font: 149 s

So, guess what? You can't say that "the keyboard is faster." You can't even say, "The keyboard is faster when replacing every second letter of every word in a text." No, you even have to say what character you're replacing it with. It gets as specific as that.

*Switching to a monospaced font didn't help much, though. I ran the test with Monaco, and didn't notice any statistically significant improvements.


Conclusions

After testing some very narrow areas of the huge field of "user interaction by keyboard vs. mouse," all I can say is that both input methods have their strengths and weaknesses, and their optimum fields of use should be analyzed and investigated much more carefully than Tog appears to have done.

Personally, I think it's best to let the user decide what method(s) to use, and provide for both keyboard and mouse-based functionalities, whenever it makes any little sense. But even providing several methods isn't going to be enough: you also have to get them right. Designing key commands and mouse targets is pretty easy to mess up, having the user end up with useless input methods even in their preferred contexts.

Also, even though some specific input methods may have intimidating learning curves, in some cases, they may be worth the effort (e.g. in the case of the iPhone keypad). Obviously, users may be a bit tough to sell on such user interface choices, so they must be explained in a careful and convincing way.

Finally, I also wonder whether it's always speed that matters. It may easily be the case that the faster way of performing a task is more exhausting, less natural, or simply less fun. Speed may or may not be important; the developer simply can't imagine every possible way his or her product will be used. Maybe a task you imagined to be pretty rare as a developer will end up being the one that your user needs to perform a thousand times in the course of two hours – so there had better be a fast way of doing it. And while you're at it, why not also create an easy way, and a fun way? Redundancy can be a great thing in the world of user interfaces.

That is, unless you can find a perfect way, one which is easy, fun, fast and natural in every situation – I'm hard-pressed to find too many examples, though.

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The Magic Text Field: searching, URLs and bookmarks

Cabel Maxfield Sasser notes how advertisements in Japan display search boxes with recommended search terms, as opposed to URLs. It certainly feels more user-friendly (and natural) to enter real words into one box (the search box) than to type something as geeky as a URL in another box (the URL field), and the author even speculates that future versions of Safari may transition to displaying a more prominent Google field and a less prominent URL field.

This has got me thinking. These are my closely related, highly anecdotal observations on URL entry vs. searching:

• Some people (especially Firefox users) enter everything, even URLs, in the Google box. (By default, a new Firefox window has focus on the Google box.) These users will have to click again at the Google-displayed URL, but they don't seem to mind.
• I sometimes catch myself mistakenly using the URL field instead of the Google field, hinting that search may be taking over from URL entry in my use as well.
• Firefox actually accommodates (perhaps encourages) this previous behavior: entering expressions in the URL box yields Google search results or top hits. Other browsers simply display the predictable error messages caused by such attempts at connecting to malformed URLs.

But then I also have some more loosely related observations as well, mostly concerning bookmarks and history items:

• I hardly ever use the bookmarks menu for opening a page, relying on the autocomplete feature of the URL field instead. That is, if I add something to my bookmarks, I will navigate to it later by starting to type some words from its URL (if meaningful), rather than choosing it from the menu.
  
• But then I hardly ever add any bookmarks either. If I want to bookmark a page for later retrieval, I don't have to do anything: it will be automatically added to the History list, and thus it will be available for autocomplete, too.
• In Leopard, Safari's history items and cached pages are indexed by Spotlight, even enabling users to find visited pages by searching for words in their contents.

The most perfect solution for me would probably involve one huge box with hooks for a lot of AI magic working behind the scenes, listing Google hits, URL matches, Wikipedia and Dictionary and other results, cached page search terms, all categorized, ranked in an ultra-smart way with the most likely results first, all displayed in real time, with easy keyboard-based navigation possibilities.

I think web pages are verbal, and the most natural way of relating to them is by typing text.

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MacBook Air: harbinger of the tablet Mac?

As I was re-reading, for some reason, my old post on the November tablet Mac rumors, and got to the part where I speculate on the features of the purported device (such as ports and disk drives), something suddenly occured to me.

As I speculated back then, a tablet Mac would very likely need to do away with some traditional Mac features, such as an optical drive. However, I didn't think it would lack Ethernet or FireWire: I thought those would be too extreme omissions.

Guess what: Apple has just shipped a Mac without any of these things. It remains to be seen how exactly people are going to respond to such a radical elimination of items whose presence in a Mac have been taken for granted for almost a decade, but looks like Apple is on to something there.

The Air is more of a breakthrough in what it lacks than it is in what new features it adds (basically, a MultiTouch trackpad), and I'm sure Apple is eagerly anticipating feedback.

If it turns out that there exists a significant enough class of users who don't mind the radical departure this Mac represents, Apple can be more confident in launching yet another product category: a tablet Mac, taking the Air's ultraportability concept yet one step further.

MultiTouch cannot be forever confined to cellphones and trackpads.

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MacBook Air: iMac or Cube?

The introduction of the new Mac laptop is a bold move by Apple, as the subnotebook radically eliminates some components that may be considered essential.

Every single Mac that Apple has released since 1998 has had Ethernet connectivity, as well as an optical drive. Since 2001, every Macintosh has also shipped with a FireWire port.

The MacBook Air does away with all three.

Sure, there are workarounds, but all are cumbersome. Ethernet is available as a $29 dongle that Apple sells separately, though it would occupy the single USB port of the Air. External optical drives also exist (Apple sells one exclusively for the MacBook Air), but carrying such additional devices around somewhat defeats the purpose of having a super thin, super light notebook. The external drive would also need to fight over the single USB port with competing devices, unless you buy yet another companion product, a USB hub.

You can also hack into the optical drives of neighboring Macs or even PCs with a piece of software that is reputed to "just work," as one expects from Apple. However, it's kind of creepy to be constantly asking favors from fellow computer users, even installing software on their machines, whenever you want to use an optical drive. And those computers had better be equipped with WiFi, too.

And as for FireWire, you're pretty much out of luck there.

So, what the hell were they thinking? How could such a device ever sell?

Well, Apple did make a similarly radical move back in 1998, when it introduced the original iMac. Steve Jobs was back with a vengeance, and he chose a pretty dramatic way to show everyone he means business: he released a sexy-looking, simple entry-level Mac that lacked a floppy drive, and eschewed traditional ports such as SCSI or ADB in favor of USB. So what happened? The iMac sold as hot cakes, and peripheral makers started to build USB keyboards, mice, scanners, etc. The floppy disk was already on its way out, but the iMac's snub might have been the last nail in its coffin. So, the iMac pretty much changed the world around it.

Will the MacBook Air do the same? Will USB flash drives kill optical disks? Will WiFi drive Ethernet into extinction? Is Apple knifing its own FireWire baby?

It certainly looks like Apple would very much like all of this to happen. Just as modems started to disappear from Macs, Ethernet may be next, surviving only in professional machines. Optical drives may still stick around for a while, though, but Apple doesn't think they will be missed from the MacBook Air. While you'll still need to leech the drive of a neighboring computer for software installs, the Mac maker would prefer if you turned to its products and services instead of using an optical drive: get music and video off iTunes, use iPods instead of burning CDs, and buy Time Capsule for backups. Clever.

There certainly is method in this madness. Anyone in the market for a $1,800 notebook must have some cash to burn on these products and services, so each Air sold (especially in countries where the iTunes Store is available in its full glory) should generate some guaranteed extra revenue for Apple. Besides, these relatively wealthy people probably already have a Mac at home anyway, helping them overcome most of their objections to the Air.

If sales of the Air reach a critical mass, the new Mac could help reform the computing landscape, just like the iMac did a decade ago. If sales end up failing to go off the charts, but remain respectable, then, well, Apple can still boast a successful niche product, and I'm sure that a hundred bucks or two may go off the price eventually, if needed.

But what if Apple has made a major miscalculation, like the one in the case of the Power Mac Cube? Wasn't it also a relatively underpowered pro-level Mac that the market deemed too expensive? Pundits crucified the Cube for putting style over substance, and weak sales of the radical-looking new Mac spelled serious trouble for the still-vulnerable Apple.

I don't think there's any reason to anticipate a similar fate for the MacBook Air. There may be some superficial similarities to the Cube, but the differences are more significant:

• As far as tech specs go, the Cube was clearly a weaker product than the Power Mac, yet it cost more. The MacBook Air is also a weaker product than the MacBook Pro, but it costs less as well. (However, it may also be compared to the MacBook, and it wouldn't fare so well in that comparison: the Air is the less capable and more expensive of the two notebooks.)
  
• Miniaturization is not such a strong selling point for a desktop Mac as it is for a notebook. The beauty of the Cube was mostly skin deep, whereas the thinness of the Air is also very practical.
  
• Apple's revenues in fiscal 2001 were $5.65 billion, whereas in 2007, they were $24 billion. Apple can better afford to risk less-than-optimal initial sales of a new experimental niche product now than it could at the time of the Cube.

I definitely don't think one should worry too much about the fate of the Air. It may not necessarily become a second iMac, but it really shouldn't be a second Cube either.

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Yet more whining on Apple secrecy

I'm sure Jens Alfke is a great guy and a great engineer, and I understand if he leaves Apple due to creative differences. Yet some of his comments seem to warrant a big "Duh!"

I think Apple’s policy on blogging is one of the least enlightened of major tech companies; Microsoft in particular is surprisingly open.

Well, Apple has been all about secrecy for the past decade or so, while Microsoft, perhaps the world's greatest vendor of vaporware, has always embraced blabbering as one of its main communication tools. Isn't it as simple as this?

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E-book readers: they look good on paper

There's been some talk about Amazon's new Kindle e-book reader being the "iPod of books." This analogy might be cute and catchy, but it's deeply flawed, and wishful thinking at best.

First, being the iPod of books is a very ambitious undertaking. Much more so than being the iPod of music. Here's why:

1. With the iPod, the content that the device was built for is music. The display is only an organizer for it. The actual presentation of the content is audio playback. With an e-book reader, however, the display has to serve not only as an organizer, but also as the actual presentation canvas for the content itself. And that's hard, because
   
2. electric devices have been able to play back music for decades. Most users were already satisfied with the sound quality of existing MP3 players even before the iPod debuted, so Apple's device didn't need to achieve a technological breakthrough in its core competence of music playback. However, no electric device exists today that could "play back" a book or a newspaper at an acceptable quality. Therefore, a successful e-book reader will need to break new ground.
3. Listening is passive, while reading is active. Listening to a song only requires you to push the play button, and the rest will just happen to you. However, reading a book requires constant and conscious interaction: not just scanning the text with your eyeballs, but also physically navigating the book by turning pages.* A device for reading has to facilitate that as well in a very humane and user-friendly way, not to mention providing additional functionality such as annotation features**.
   

*What if an e-book reader could automatically scroll, tracking your eyeballs?

**This blog post of mine is serving me as a great lesson about procrastination. I've been working on it for over a week, and in the meantime, several other web authors have posted their opinions, which are in some cases very similar to mine. Ars Technica's John Stokes, for example, mentions annotation features, as well as several other points I also visit.


The Muzak of Books

But there's more on the iPod analogy front. The music you hear on an iPod is comparable to what you hear on your stereo. Sure, the quality is certainly not the same as on a high-end device, but it's is acceptable for the vast majority of users, most of whom would be hard-pressed to tell much of the difference anyway.

However, just imagine, for a moment, an iPod that could only play a MIDI version of any song. You would hear your favorite songs arranged for generic software instruments, and some machine voice would do all the vocals.

Would this device be a hit? Would you buy it?

I'm asking because this is more or less what Kindle, or any other e-book solution on the market today, does. What it presents is nothing but the MIDI version of a book. Layout is generated on the fly, using a generic font. Sure, the original words are kept, just like the original notes in a MIDI version of a song. But yet it's not the same song, and it's not the same book. It's the Muzak version of a book. It looks more like a webpage. Compared to the real thing, it's an abomination.

Readers want the real thing; the book as it has been designed and laid out by design professionals.

Sure, Muzak has its place in elevators and public toilets, but it's not the music you love, it's not what inspires your kids to write fan mail. And the same way, Kindle is perfectly suitable for reading an end-user license agreement or a shopping list – but not something you care about, not something you grow attached to.


A book reader? That's me!

And finally, there's a third thing. Your iPod does not equal to the music on it. The two are very separate things. An iPod is just the device that plays your music. The music is something you cannot touch, wherever it's coming from. A band, a stereo, a clock radio, an iPod: these are sources of music, you never think of them as the music itself. You don't even think of a CD as the music itself: it's just a recording that you have to get music out of by playing it in some device.

It's not that I have a penchant for stating the obvious, but this is a very important difference between music and books. Books have a physical representation that music or films lack: they are objects. The volume that you hold in you hand isn't a "source of book," or a "book recording" that you have to "play back." Nope. It's the book itself. It's a thing.* You need eyes and hands to read it, no other devices are necessary.

*Again, someone else has said it better as I was plugging away with this post. Damn.

Envisioning a device that will one day complement, substitute and perhaps even replace paper-based books, and calling it an "e-book reader" is a mistake. If such a device is to emerge, it won't be "playing back" a book: it will have to be the book.

I picture a featureless, lightweight, white or semitransparent, sublime-looking object, about the weight, size and shape of a book. Its surface would appear to be paper-like, with text and images apparently printed on it: it would show a page from a book. (Or maybe a spread. I know that there would be some serious and hard design decisions to be made, like how to accommodate oversized layouts such as a newspaper's.)

Looking at this thing from a distance, you could even mistake it for some high-tech version of a book. Not a reader: you're the reader. It's the book.

You would turn pages by imitating page-turning gestures on its touch-sensitive surface. You could flick it by manipulating its side. It would need to accommodate loads of other familiar gestures, in order to make you feel like you're reading a book (like, half-turning a page to see what's behind it, then turning it back). And the whole thing would need to bring you as much as possible of the whole book experience, such as layout, design, typography, look and feel, and even as many as humanly possible of these partly tongue-in-cheek, yet entirely perfectly valid points.

Maybe the world isn't ready for such a device. Not in the "world's not ready for Vista" sense, but simply because the hardware needed for such a device isn't feasible yet.

Of course, this thing will happen one day. Maybe it will work through directly stimulating parts of your brain to give you a complex multisensory illusion of reading a book, and you shouldn't expect it before 2100. Maybe it will happen next year. But it will be there.

We need to save trees. We need to simplify logistics. We need more interactivity: spoilt by the web experience, how many times did you wish you had hyperlinks or search boxes in a book or newspaper you were reading?


A real-world need

Two years ago, I left my home country. Among various other changes, I'm no longer able to read my favorite newspaper as it's not available where I live now.

Even though it's the year 2007, there's still no technology out there that could help me out. And no, Kindle won't be the answer either.

Back in the days, I would drive to work for an afternoon shift, and I'd make a stop at a drive-in restaurant for an early afternoon breakfast. I would buy my favorite paper, fold it out in front of me, and read it while eating.

I would look at the front page, and see what's above and below the fold. I would look at the teasers, the headlines, the subheads, the captions; the different fonts and typefaces, the weighing of contents by the size and position attributed to them by the editors and designers.

I would subconsciously use the placement of photos, the clever typographic solutions, and all the other subtle ways of presenting all the information and meta-information, to choose which stories I would read, and in what order. To this day, I can recall some of the stories the paper broke years ago, and my recollections are always complete with the entire layout, not just the words and the pictures.

After looking at the front page, I would go in. As I'd turn the pages, some familiarly distinct features would appear, making sure both that I feel at home and that I can find my way.

For instance, there was be the opinion page, one of my favorites. One big editorial, serious in tone, set in boldface (a bit of an assault on readability, but still, I'd grown to like it). A short, rather caustic opinion piece, in a larger font, set in italics. A small box with a short scathing op-ed always by the same guy, day in, day out. And in the center of the page, a large essay on some controversial issue, with an attention-grabbing pull quote: something I was almost certain to read every day.

When I moved halfway across Europe, I was looking for ways to keep reading that paper (which was not available on newsstands in my new adopted home). A subscription was out of the question: both the expense and the delay would have been forbidding.

So I subscribed online. I was looking for the same experience, or at least something similar. But it wasn't meant to be.

It's not just that I was unable to take my subscription to a restaurant. It's not just that I was confined to a computer for reading. All I could access was a page with a list of headlines. I could click on each, and the text would appear in my browser. As would the photos. I could also search, and get yet more clickable lists.

That was it. No layout, no design, no presentation. Just the words and the pictures. It was a website, except that the stories were not written for the web. They were cut and pasted from the paper. It was less than a website, and much less than a newspaper. It united the disadvangates of both.

I despised it and canceled after a few weeks.

Apparently, whoever was in charge of the online version thought that content was the only thing that mattered, where content would equal all the words and the pictures. According to this belief, when you buy a paper, you pay for words and pictures, and that's it. Today's newspapers place these things tediously on pages, requiring a lot of human effort, but that's only because a printed page has a limited capacity, and working with this limitation is hard. In a better, more advanced world, there will be no more paper, therefore there will be no need for laboriously placing the contents on these things called "pages." You would just present a table of contents, and the contents themselves, which are free to flow without any spatial limitation.

Therefore, a newspaper or a book would be just like a webpage, and all you'd do is search, click, and then scroll, scroll, scroll and scroll as you read.

Welcome to the brave new world. Luckily, this will never happen. Anyone who thinks that a newspaper, a magazine, a book, or basically anything that gets printed, is nothing but a sum of its words and pictures is seriously, sadly mistaken, and will not be the driving force behind a successfull e-book concept.

Anyone who doesn't know the vast, incredible importance of layout and presentation simply doesn't get publishing, period.

Anyone who gets publishing knows that an online HTML version of any print publication is not an equivalent of the original.

Apparently, Jeff Bezos doesn't get publishing. He's good at selling books and other things. He's a salesman. He may even be a sales visionary. But that's it.

An acceptable presentation of a book or a newspaper in an electric solution means that it has to look very close to the real thing. It has to make you forget that you're looking at a gadget.


Apple's chance

Currently, the only company that seems to even come close to "getting" things like these is Apple. In addition to its obvious lead in user interface design, its famous dedication to any design, and very specifically, typography, is a clear indication. Remember, the Mac was the device that kick-started desktop publishing in the eighties.

I think, or rather, I hope, that Apple will introduce a device to top Kindle, turning Amazon's attempt into the kind of roadkill that litters the technology highways. Kind of like the iPod did to the likes of the Archos Jukebox.

Three years ago, based on the success of the iPod, I thought Apple could probably be the one company to pull it off.

Now, in 2007, Apple has unveiled Multi-Touch, as well as an embedded version of OS X. If e-books are going to be more than a blip on the radar any time soon, they will be courtesy of Apple, not Amazon.

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Kindle: damn, they stole my idea. Here's my mail to Steve Jobs from 2004

Naive as I was, I sent the following e-mail to Steve Jobs back in 2004.
Needless to say, he never wrote back.

Dear Steve,

Here's a product/service idea I think Apple could pull off pretty decently.

We all hope that one day lots of trees will be spared by switching from paper to a digital alternative. Yet it's not happening. E-book readers crash and burn. People insist on real books and newspapers, and it seems to be an emotional thing.

Or is it? I think it's just that current devices suck. Apple could, once again, show the world how it's done, and make it a hit.

Here's what I think it needs.

(1) A reader (let's call it an iPad for now) needs to resemble a book. It should look non-technical, white, matte, and just beg to be read like a book. (Most of this is a display thing.)

(2) Once iPad resembles a book (breaking users' resistence), people will see incredible benefits. How about "A thousand volumes in your hands?" Readers easily navigate through book collections, take notes, use bookmarks, etc. (Touch-screen technology and on-screen keyboards should be considered. Miniaturization isn't such a big issue here.)

(3) PDF should be to the iPad what MP3 is to the iPod. Transferring these files for immediate access needs to be a breeze. One hidden benefit: users will stop printing long documents that they'd only read once (like software tutorials). People hate reading on computer screens – this should be a hardcopy replacement, not a computer replacement.

(4) Apple has good enough reputation in the contents business to launch an e-bookstore and get large publishers on board. If this catches on, it can be an even bigger cost saver than AAC vs CD. Not to mention periodicals like dailies that face stiff competition from the Web: they could fight back this way. DRM is needed, natch.

(5) You may want to take the computer partly out of the equation. Introduce a small, cheap flash-RAM dongle that retails free of charge as a supplement to books -- or is sold separately. It contains a DRM-protected copy of the book, and it plugs right into the iPad. You can read it while it's plugged (no piracy). Think about buying newspapers at the newsstands like this, on 1" by 1" cards! Quite revolutionary, saving huge printing costs and time.

That's it. If I got you started, I'll gratefully accept donations.

All the best,

András Puiz

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Maybe this iPhone will be an U.S. thing after all?

Despite all the hype, the response to the iPhone in Europe isn't nearly like it was in the U.S. Is T-Mobile happy with 10 thousand units sold in Germany on the first day?!

I hope Apple knows, but Europe is a different market. Mobile telephony was born here. There are several service providers, with competitive plans. People here live and breathe cellphones. They unlock phones. And there is a huge choice of devices. Oh, and the iPhone plans are horribly expensive.

Also, saying that the iPod doesn't enjoy a monopoly like in the U.S. (arguably an important factor in the iPhone's success) would be a huge understatement. The iPod's market share in Germany "hit a high" of around 28% in 2007: nowhere close to U.S. figures.

I wonder if Apple wants the iPhone to be a rock star in Europe, or just a device with respectable sales. In the former case, the company may soon be forced to go back to the drawing board and rethink its European iPhone strategy.

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Behind the rumors: is it an iPhone Pro, or a Mac touch?

According to recent rumors, "Asus is helping Apple build a Tablet PC." This comes only a few weeks after a rumor suggesting the return of the Newton handheld computer.

I strongly believe that (a) a new device is coming indeed, and (b) it will sport a MultiTouch interface.

But is it going to be an extended iPod touch/iPhone, or will it be a modified Mac? I think both are possible. Here's what I think about these two (not mutually exclusive) scenarios.

Mac touch

Tablet PCs have failed only because they were horrendously badly executed, and were saddled with ridiculous ideas. No usable keyboard? Why the hell would anyone want to interact with a computer via handwriting? Isn't typing demonstrably faster? Hello?

That doesn't mean, however, that a tablet PC is inherently a bad idea. On the contrary: at worst, eliminating a physical keyboard could easily save space and cost, ushering in a new class of unexpensive, miniaturized PCs. At best, a new set of thoughful metaphors could emerge, with several advantages over traditional input mechanisms.

The iPhone has shown us all that Apple gets it. The iPhone interface features direct manipulation metaphors that arguably beat everything else out there, including the mouse and the trackball. It can also simulate a keyboard, though the lack of physical feedback is a disadvantage. (Apple may be working on a solution there: I sure hope they are.)

How difficult would it be for Apple to modify Mac OS X in order to accommodate a MultiTouch user interface, complete with a usable onscreen keyboard? A stylus would probably be included for precision work, but most tasks could be achieved using your fingers. Just imagine your daily work on a Mac, and imagine using your fingers instead of the mouse: I'm hard-pressed to find anything that would no longer be doable. (Things like right-clicking would need clever substitutes, though.)

It can be argued whether or not "direct manipulation" of objects on the screen would be better than using a pointing device on a different surface. However, some new metaphors, borrowed from the iPhone and from trackpads of Apple's laptops, could definitely provide a superior experience. Think about two-finger scrolling, page-turning gestures, or the zooming "pinch": these certainly beat scroll arrows or "next page" buttons. And yet further multi-finger gestures could be born, something that no mouse could ever accommodate. (And besides, even single-finger gestures are much easier and more natural than their mouse equivalents: operating a mouse is not that easy; we've just all gotten used to it.)

Specs: If Apple believes the "Mac touch" to be a potentially superior device, one that would one day supplant both the desktop and the notebook form factors, shipping large and powerful configurations would make a lot of sense. If Apple only views the "touch" as a companion device, whose main selling point is its miniaturization, then obviously, we're only talking about smaller configurations. Maybe there would be a "Pro" class, even, featuring different storage and size options.

There's a minimum screen size below which the device would be hard to use; thus I don't think we would see a Mac touch with a screen smaller than 8" or maybe even 10". Larger configurations could be just about any size, even 20", though I would be surprised if Apple actually shipped such a huge Mac touch at the device's debut.

The small version(s) would definitely represent a breakthrough in miniaturization, so it's questionable whether they would even feature optical drives. I imagine a very thin form factor, dominated by a huge screen, one or two buttons, speakers, a microphone, and Bluetooth, WiFi, Ethernet, USB and FireWire interfaces. It would definitely use batteries. As for internal storage, smaller models could avoid hard disks and use flash memory; a larger (Pro?) family could perhaps use both (as well as an optical drive).

Pros*: Compatible with existing Mac; full-featured; no need for Apple to port OS or apps
Cons*: Form factor too large for some uses; no real breakthrough in miniaturization; probably costly


iPhone Pro/Newton

I've always yearned for a time when miniaturization would endow a handheld device with the full functionality of a computer. Then I realized that it's not as simple as that. In order to be successful and usable, a tiny computer needs a different, well thought out user interface – it can't just run the OS of its full-sized siblings.

This is why I was so ecstatic about the birth of a new platform this January. Apple's handheld OS X and other related technologies have proven themselves to work beautifully, and they are bound to make their way into other products. Since then, they have already given birth to the iPod touch: a somewhat premature development in my opinion, but a necessary one to keep the freshness of the iPod brand (I'd wager heavily that most iPod sales come from the nano and maybe the classic.)

What if Apple were to release a similar, though somewhat larger device, one that could function as a supercharged PDA and/or a stripped-down Mac?

After all, most of the work is already done. The technology is there, all Apple needs to do is build a larger device, write some additional apps (or port some existing apps over to it), and voilà: there's your new Newton, powered by iPhone technologies (perhaps without the phone part, though)!

As an aside: I'm relieved that my iPhone predictions are turning out to be overly pessimistic in light of the SDK that Apple announced. We still don't know from Steve Jobs' musings how open the platform is going to get, or how smart Apple itself is going to make the phone – will it sprout a clipboard any time soon, for example –, but at least, the phone will further tap into the huge potential of having OS X running on a handheld device. However, I'm still not sure if the iPhone will ever be intended to become a true PDA or handheld computer. I think Apple will strive to keep simplicity as one of its main virtues. So, there may be room for a more powerful iPhone-like device in Apple's product matrix.

Specs: This would be a handheld device, though a somewhat larger one than the iPhone. It would expand on the capabilities and features of the iPhone – or of the iPod touch. (It's a good question whether it would double as a cellphone: such a functionality would certainly be welcome, especially for internet access, but having to commit to a monthly plan would also turn away some potential users. Maybe two versions would emerge, one with, and one without a phone.)

It would probably ship with enhanced versions of iPhone apps, as well as additional ones written by Apple. All in all, it would be a new-ish platform; an evolutionary development over the iPhone, but perhaps consummating the revoution it started.

Bluetooth, WiFi, flash memory would be a given, anything else (Ethernet, USB, etc.) could be anyone's guess.

Pros*: Smaller form factor; possible cellphone functionality; potentially lower price
Cons*: Incompatible with Mac software; still not a full-blown computer; yet another platform for Apple to support, and for third parties to develop for


* Pros and cons: a comparison between the two speculative scenarios.

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Leopard's Stacks renders Dock even more useless

It's obvious by now that the Dock is Steve's pet feature, otherwise such a usability nightmare would have been scrapped long ago. Yeah, I've kind of gotten used to it, but still: it's awful.

It fails most prominently as an application launcher. First of all, it can only hold a handful of your apps. If you add too many, they will be too tiny to be practical.

Second, this is clearly the case when a word is worth a thousand pictures. If I look for Photoshop, I want to find it under "P," not "next to the icon with the QuickTime logo, not far from the stamp icon." You can alphabeticize names. You cannot put icons in any meaningful order. So every time I look for an app in the Dock, I waste several seconds, and grow just a bit more frustrated.

Luckily, there is (or rather, was) a solution. I put my Applications folder in the Dock. I click on it, and up pops the entire hierarchical list of all my apps. This is such a great shortcut that I cannot live without it.

In fact, every time I sit down to anyone's Mac, I make sure to put the Applications folder in their Dock. That's the only way I can even begin to work. After I'm done, I leave it there. Nobody complains.

It should be there by default.

Shockingly, Apple is disabling this functionality. According to David Pogue:

I'm not totally sold on the Stacks feature. That's where you click a folder icon on your Dock, and rather than a complete menu of the folder's contents, you get a fan or a grid that shows an array of the actual icons inside. Trouble is, if there are more than 24 items in that folder (depending on your screen size), you get only a partial list. To see the rest of the contents, you have to click the icon that says, "35 more in Finder," which opens that folder's actual desktop window.

There's no way to make the Dock show the complete list of folder contents anymore; nor can you stick your hard drive's icon in the Dock and have complete, drill-down, hierarchical access to your entire computer, as you could before.

Wow. I didn't see this one coming.

This can very easily be a dealbreaker for me. I'm not joking.

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Apple, Jobs developing new, human side?

Ever since the return of Steve Jobs, Apple hasn't been about faces. Withe the exception of Apple's media events where Jobs, Phil Schiller, the occasional product manager or VP would take the stage, Apple's people have been mostly hiding in shadows.

When you interact with Apple's web page, you don't interact with people. You read news items or carefully crafted PR, search databases, buy with 1-Click™, or, at best, interact with other users in the support forums. It's all cool and impersonal.

Even video introductions for products show screencasts, and feature professional voice actors.

Under Jobs' tenure, "About" boxes of Apple's software products stopped listing the names of individuals (perhaps for fear of making the jobs of headhunters too easy). Even O'Reilly's Learning Cocoa book was, somewhat ridiculously, written by "Apple Computer, Inc." Not by people.

But that trend has been changing lately. First, there was the iPhone guy. Then Steve Jobs started to blog. And now we have the Leopard guy.

Why?

Jobs has "blogged" on the following occasions so far: when he delivered his open letter to record industry executives; when he addressed criticism by environmentalists and envisioned a greener Apple; when he announced a rebate for early iPhone customers; and finally, when promising an iPhone SDK (no link available, the announcement is simply a text-only item in Apple's Hot News section).

The first "blog post" is unique in that Jobs expresses a personal opinion and attempts to influence decisions by executives of an industry by summoning the power of media. It isn't something a company or a CEO does routinely, it certainly isn't business as usual, thus its unusual format is understandable and warranted.

However, the other items could easily be replaced by traditional Apple press releases. They do not really contain anything special that would necessitate their unorthodox format. There doesn't seem to be anything inherently suggesting a need for personal communication from Steve Jobs in those messages. Yet Jobs has chosen to present them as personally signed pieces of communication.

Again, why?

Similarly, the two new faces Apple has attributed to its iPhone and Leopard products (without names, though) mark a strange departure. None of the demos we see from these two guys would suffer one small bit, none would be any less informative or useful if we saw no faces, only narrated screencasts and close-up shots.

Yet Apple has decided to add those faces.

Why?

Is it just some PR stunt that Apple's advisers have come up with?

Or is Apple maybe concerned that it's growing too big and scary? Is it adding a human touch in order to counterbalance a (perceived or real) mean streak in its operations? The buy-me-twice ringtones, the options scandal, the monopoly accusations?

Or is Steve Jobs simply growing more vain, mellow or sentimental with age? Does he maybe think more and more about his image, his perception – maybe his legacy?

By the way. Did you notice how that Leopard guy really looks and sounds like Steve Jobs doing a keynote? By the time he talks about Quick Look, his voice could be mistaken for Steve's. He could be nicknamed Steve Lite. It's almost spooky.

Maybe this is what Jobs means when he keeps talking about Apple's DNA.

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Quo vadis, iPhone?

People all over the web are giving Apple hell for breaking unauthorized and unsupported third-party iPhone hacks with its 1.1 software update. There are two types of these hacks: ones enabling the iPhone to be used with any SIM card; and others which just let users install third-party apps on the device. The former directly hurt Apple and AT&T, therefore Apple is actively trying to prevent these hacks. The latter, however, don't do much harm, thus Apple doesn't go out of its way to break them. Break them it does, nevertheless, prompting liberation movements to spring up and demand the franchisement of the iPhone from the evil tyranny of Apple. What could be more ridiculous than that?

Some of these critics jump to the conclusion that Apple doesn't get the importance of third-party applications. Well, chance may have it that Apple doesn't plan to ever allow third-party apps on the iPhone, but we don't know that.

I'm more inclined to believe that Apple wants to do it right.

There's a common sentiment out there that accuses Apple of some sort of haughty elitism. Wil Shipley put it this way:

I know Steve Jobs; he's actually amazingly like my old business partner Mike Matas. They both love closed systems, for a simple reason -- they both know they're smarter than anyone else on the planet, and they don't need anyone else mucking up their systems. Steve would rather have no third parties for Mac OS X if he could get away with it -- Apple, of course, would do a much better job on anything, but since customers insist on Photoshop and Office and other apps, he puts up with them. (Well, except, now Apple has their own office suite.) Steve knows that on a computer, having a broad spectrum of apps is more important that having them all be Apple-perfect.

But on iPods, Airports, Apple TVs, and now iPhones, Apple wants every app perfect. Which is nice, in theory. In practice, it means innovation only happens at Apple's pace. The marketplace of ideas is much smaller, and the devices are much poorer because of it. (Example: Why can't I stream music from my iPhone or iPod touch to my Airport Express?)

Emphasis mine.

Now, we don't know if Apple plans to open up the iPhone for third-party developers. But Wil is right: Apple doesn't need anyone else mucking up its systems. Some of those unsupported, unofficial third-party hacks would do just that. Muck up the system.

If Apple opens up the iPhone for developers, making third-party apps official and a supported feature of the phone, it won't be able to afford to have those apps crash the phone.

Apps on a computer can crash, sure. We're used to that. There are about five ways to force a misbehaving Mac app to quit, and a crashed Mac up will leave the rest of your system intact.

But remember the days before Mac OS X? Remember the bomb?

Remeber when a crash could render your entire computer unusable?

Do you also remember what happened when your frontmost app got unresponsive? Basically, so did your Mac.

With the limited user interface of the iPhone, a misbehaving app can easily create the illusion of a misbehaving iPhone. How do you know that it's only Johnnie's Shareware Recipe Editor that froze, not your iPhone? Will you blame Johnnie's Shareware Garage, LLC, or Apple, Inc?

Besides, people are far less forgiving about a frozen phone than about a frozen computer. A phone is just a phone, even if it can double as a computer.

What next? Your car keys freezing? Your beer opener?

If Apple does plan to allow third-party apps, it needs to perform some magic that prevents the user from just about ever having an iPhone locked up by third-party software.

Perhaps a daemon should be running, monitoring every application's responsiveness, and returning to the home screen when the frontmost app is having problems? Add a status message that informs the user of this incident? Or should there be a well-advertised, sure-fire, and foolproof user action that never fails to quit a misbehaving app? These things would need to be sorted out.

And besides, Apple would need to isolate parts of the system from direct access by third parties. We know that the iPhone was completed on a tight deadline, remember why Leopard hasn't shipped yet? So, it's not unreasonable to think that its software still has some rough edges, and nobody other than Apple's engineers should really be playing with it for a while.

So even if third-party application development is in the iPhone's future, it's only reasonable to expect that it takes time to implement properly.

I think that, for the near future, iPhone development will consist of the following:

1. Apple delivering significant and free software updates: Notice how Apple's subscription-based iPhone accounting suggests that the iPhone will have more features in the future courtesy of Apple.
2. Hand-picked third parties delivering applications, either for free or for a small fee: think about Google Maps already on the iPhone, and iPod games that are sold via iTunes. The iPod is also a closed platform, but there's still some third-party development going on, closely controlled by Apple. There's nothing stopping Apple from doing just that. As they would get to "bless" any third-party app before it becomes available, Apple could maintain its strict quality standards for the phone. A rumor to this effect is already out.
   
3. Web applications may transition into Widgets. Rumors already suggest that improvements to the WebKit framework are on their way, enabling "web applications" to be stored offline. What exactly separates an "offline web app" from a Widget? Not much, mostly the capability to run arbitrary code (including Cocoa Objective-C). I'm inclined to think that a Dashboard-like SDK may be a compromise between the needs of Apple and developers: a sandbox with limited access to iPhone features, but at least not something that runs on a server.

Unlimited, no-holds-barred third-party development could turn the iPhone into a PDA and more. It could turn the iPhone into a VoIP device, causing a loss of revenue for AT&T (and thus for Apple as well).

Apple's new software updates for the iPhone will certainly serve as an indication as to where Apple wants the device to be heading. The first software update has come and gone, and we still don't have a clipboard, making the iPhone basically useless for any text editing apart from typing out a quick e-mail. There's no user-accessible file system, no SSH client, no instant messaging, no editing capabilities for Microsoft Office documents. In other words, the iPhone is not a PDA, and it's definitely not targeted at enterprise users or geeks.

The iPhone may be the smartest phone ever made, but it's not a smartphone.

Does Apple even want to change that? I'm getting the impression that Apple wants the iPhone to be pretty much what it is today, and those of us who expect software updates to turn it into a device with a greatly expanded set of capabilities will be ultimately disappointed.

I hope to be wrong, but I think Apple wants the vast, almost unlimited potential of the embedded OS X operating system to remain largely unfulfilled on the iPhone.

If the rumors of the Newton's revival are true, then perhaps those of us waiting for an ultrasmart PDA from Apple should set our sights on this new mythical beast, and resign to the fact that the iPhone is, and will always be, a cellphone.

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Fake Steve: has he still got it?

This stuff is just brilliant:

You let me know what time and what to wear. I'll be there in jeans and a black turtleneck, two hours late.

It's quotes like these that make me forget that Fake Steve has been exposed as some Forbes editor. Daniel Lyons is just brilliant, brilliant.

Something has been bothering me, though, ever since he revealed his true identity, and I haven't realized until recently what it was.

I thought Fake Steve was a thoroughbred, inveterate, dyed-in-the-wool Apple and Mac zealot, someone with a Steve Jobs fetish, and exceptional writing skills. Okay, it was incredibly naive of me to think that he wasn't an accomplished writer, that he was a natural. He is way too good for that.

But after the revelation, I felt that somehow part of the magic was lost. I haven't been able to pinpoint it for a long time, but now I know why.

Even though Lyons says that he's an Apple fan, it's this quote (same source) that's been bothering me:

Mr. Lyons said he invented the Fake Steve character last year, when a small group of chief executives turned bloggers attracted some media attention. He noticed that they rarely spoke candidly. “I thought, wouldn’t it be funny if a C.E.O. kept a blog that really told you what he thought? That was the gist of it.”

Mr. Lyons says he recalled trying out the voices of several chief executives before settling on the colorful Apple co-founder.

See? He's not obsessed with Steve Jobs or Apple. He could (and would) have chosen any other CEO.

When he extols the virtues of the iPhone, the Mac, or Apple's strategy with over-the-top exaggeration, his parody isn't self-ironic: it's merely surgically accurate.

My impression is that Fake Steve is less soul and more brains than I've believed.

Fake Steve was unavailable for comment.

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Numbers rocks: how I forgot about the review and ended up doing my budget

Apple has made a trial version of the iWork suite available as a free download. Pretty smart move: the suite is relatively small (it fits on a CD), so this is a great way to get people test drive the latest version of this emerging little office suite. (Let me get back to the "office suite" part later.) You can buy an activation code online to unlock the trial version, so basically, Apple is distributing iWork '08 as shareware. Cool.

I've put Keynote and Pages through their paces, and they're OK. But what I've been most interested in was Numbers. Why? Here's a list why:

1. It's new. Duh.
   
2. It's a spreadsheet app, and those are relatively rare. Word processors are a dime a dozen.
3. I wanted to see if Numbers is competitive with Excel.
4. I work with data a lot (Excel, FileMaker, and so on), and wanted to see if this new tool is of any use for me.

As anecdotal as it gets, but still, wow...

So I fired up Numbers, and started off by using one of its built-in templates. I noticed one that was called "Budget," [edit: originally I wrote "Home Budget," not sure how I'd got that wrong] and thought, what the hell, let me try that one.

I've been putting off drafting an annual personal budget for quite some time now. I was looking for the right tool for the job. Now, it's important to know that I'm a tool freak. (Also a Tool freak, but that's probably beside the point.) That is, I can obsess about the right tool for the job a lot more than about the job itself. It's almost a policy. Yep, I know this can be a flaw. But not always.

Anyway. So far, I've tried creating FileMaker Pro databases, using and extending Excel templates, and I've always given up after a certain point. Building a FileMaker database is almost like writing an application: you need to do a lot of work before you can start using it. About Excel, I just didn't know where to start. The built-in templates weren't much use, and as for rolling my own: the task seemed a little too intimidating. Before getting on with the already daunting task of drafting a budget, I would need to decide on how many worksheets to use, what kind of tables to design, and how to interconnect them, etc. I'm not bad with Excel, but whenever I embarked on this budget project, I must admit that I always ended up giving up.

So, last week, I fired up Numbers, and opened its Budget template. It was pretty straightforward, I just about immediately figured out how it worked. And to my utter surprise, it was almost exactly what I needed. I made some small adjustments, and started putting in my numbers. Then I made some more adjustments to the template, consulting the help file two or three times.

After about five hours, I was still frantically, furiously working on my budget. I was sweating, but what I was fighting was my numbers, not Numbers. I didn't even notice the app was there.

And that's just about the best thing you can say about an application. It gets out of the way, and lets you do your thing. Oh, and the template is very nice, too. Maybe that's where Excel lost me on this one, and Numbers won me.


These are my first main observations about Numbers

Numbers doesn't have one workbook with several infinitely large worksheets. It has pages with tables, which are the size you want them to be. This doesn't only make your numbers nicer to present, but also makes it easier to work with them: you can see all the tables at the same time, you don't need to switch between worksheets.

If you mouse near the border of a table, some controls pop up. You can insert, delete, or drag and drop columns and rows, you can sort and rename columns, and so on. These operations are extremely intuitive, though really mouse-heavy: there are no keyboard shortcuts for most of these. Working in Numbers feels a bit more like working in InDesign, and less like in Excel, where you can let go of the mouse for quite some time if you want. To me, this is a clear shortcoming, but a tolerable one.

Numbers is very good with defaults: it knows that most users will want their tables to have headers; and that when you sort, you'll usually want to sort the entire table. (This is a pet Excel peeve of mine: using auto-filters, you can never be sure if your entire table is being sorted. Some pesky little thing can prevent some columns from being sorted, and you'll end up with useless data.)

While sorting is dead simple, there are no auto-filters in Numbers. Filtering is dialog-based, and clearly more cumbersome than in the Microsoft suite. Also, the only way to tell if your data is filtered is by noticing missing row numbers. Excel has other visual clues, and they are important. Probably Apple's research shows that people don't really use filters that much. It's a pity, because I do.

Tables can have headers by default (there are several table templates you can choose from, but you can fully modify a table after creation), and they can also have titles (captions). These are great time savers as you add and arrange new tables to your work area (called a Canvas).

Numbers makes sure your spreadsheets are neatly organized and beautiful. Just like a great schoolteacher, it will instill a sense of work ethic in you, inviting you to keep your work clean and well-organized. (Don't use Numbers for committing tax fraud or plotting evil schemes. You will break down with guilt and give up.)

One annoying bit: as you move or resize a table that has another table on its right side, Numbers will always move that table too, keeping the distance constant between the two, even if that's not what you want. (Thanks to the reader who pointed out that this behavior can be turned off in Preferences.) And believe me: you will care about how your tables look. Numbers will make you.

Cross-references between tables and cells are quite like in Excel, except that they use column and table names, not numbers. Luckily, these names update dynamically.

There's a generous helping of functions, and for obvious reasons, they have the same syntax as in Excel. Not nearly all of Excel's functions are present, though. Worse, I've been relying heavily on Excel's extensive help system when constructing a function: as you type, it displays the syntax for you, and mousing over each part will show you additional details. It's very easy to get specific help for each function. Not so in Numbers: you're pretty much on your own, and help is awkward. Functions are probably also considered an advanced feature that relatively few users would be interested in. Hopefully, Apple will beef up this part of Numbers for the next version.

There is one very useful feature, though, that immediately made me a fan (that is, if one can get fanatic about spreadsheets). Select a few cells in Excel, and the app will display the sum of all the numbers in them. Numbers takes this concept a step further: not only does it display their sum, count, average, minimum and maximum, but also lets you drag these to your table, as a really quick and easy way to create a summary field. Well done, that one!


Bloatware vs. clutterware

So Lasso is here, and it's sexy indeed. But does it take on Excel? Well, yes, and no. Excel has macros (though you'll have to kiss them good-bye soon, as they will be absent from the next Mac version.) It also has tons and tons and tons of advanced features that Apple did not include in Numbers.

Now, there will certainly be people who dismiss all these tons of Excel features as "bloatware," but I will certainly not go down that road. I'm with Joel Spolsky here: he believes that the size (and the complexity and the feature count) of applications increases as do our needs. He also gives us his spin the 20/80 rule, i.e. that while it may be that 80% of users use only 20% of the features, it's not the same 20% for everyone.

I do believe that software can be too complicated and intimidating (and Microsoft Office is certainly like that). However, that doesn't have much to do with the number of features, but rather with their presentation. I would rather call it clutterware than bloatware. Features are necessary, but throwing them all at the user in a big scary mess is wrong.

For a version 1.0 release like Numbers, Apple did have to narrow its focus on the most commonly-used features. However, here's hoping that the scope of Numbers will grow in time. And knowing Apple, I'm fairly confident that Numbers will never become clutterware. Bloatware maybe -- but, as Joel says, that's actually a good thing.

Is iWork an office suite then? It would probably be an inaccurate moniker, and one that Apple seems to want to avoid (never calling it an office suite, going with "productivity suite" instead). This has to be at least partly due to a marketing effort that carefully tries to avoid the appearance of competing directly with Microsoft. But marketing materials, as well as iWork templates, also clearly indicate a focus on the home, small business, and educational markets, Apple's traditional strongholds. Besides, large corporations would need collaboration features clearly missing from iWork.

I wonder whether Apple will, over time, address the corporate market more aggressively. We can say that, with iWork '08, it's on the doorstep, but not yet knocking.

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iMacs ditch iPod look for iPhone colors

When the iMac G5 was released, its slogan was "From creators of iPod: iMac." I wasn't sure if the irony in that line was intentional, but it was pretty rich: how much has the world turned that the iMac brand, once a cultural icon, needed to be propped up by the popularity of a mere MP3 player?

But now, the iMac looks like the iPhone. It's silver and black, and its screen is made of glass (with its glossiness touted as a feature, which makes me shudder). Its screen has a black border. Even its iSight webcam looks a bit like the iPhone's single button.

Is this a new design trend for Apple's consumer products? Until now, Apple's professional hardware was very visibly made of aluminum, while most of its consumer products were black or white. The only exceptions were the colorful, metallic iPods (nanos and shuffles).

The iPhone is a brand new product category, and it comes as no surprise that its color scheme defies that of Apple's other products. But now the iMac is following suit. This can mean one of two things in my opinion, and only time will tell which one is the case:

1. Apple is shifting its design policies yet again, moving away from white/black plastics for consumer Macs. Such shifts have happened in the past, just think about the various color schemes for iMacs and iBooks (from bondi blue to various selections of multiple colors to psychedelic patterns to an elegant white) in the late nineties, or the similar changes in the professional line-up from the same bondi blue to various shades of graphite, and from black to titanium to aluminum in the case of pro laptops.

The color scheme has never been as straightforward and consistent as it was recently (until the arrival of the new iMac), we have to wonder whether Apple is giving up some of that consistency. Future revisions of the MacBook line will be a certain indication.

But luckily, I think every major color scheme transition so far has pointed to a classier direction (if we disregard the few last revisions of the G3 iMac).

2. The iMac is no longer a consumer Mac. Well, one can argue that it's now a pro-quality machine, or simply one that's sitting on the fence dividing the pro and consumer categories. Its software bundle doesn't contain any specifically consumer or pro apps, but then neither does any current Mac's: Tech Specs pages indicate that Apple seems to have quietly stopped bundling third-party apps with Macs.

In any case, the iMac seems to be a mighty machine. Some further random observations:

• I wonder what the keyboard feels like. I have some doubts. Apple hasn't always exactly been a champion of input device ergonomy.
• The mouse now looks out of place. Will there be one made of aluminum too?
  
• Apple's digs at Windows PCs, specifically Dells, are back. The comparison photo is particularly mean.

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Random anti-bad-idea post: Sentenc.es

I learned about this a while ago via Daring Fireball. John Gruber was endorsing the idea.

Basically, Mike Davidson complains that answering even short e-mail questions may take very long, and also that as he gets too many e-mails, he tends to prioritize the easiest ones to answer, not the most important ones.

Don't we all. But his solution makes me shudder. He now always responds in five sentences. He wanted to do a word or char count, but that's difficult, so he arrived at counting sentences. He then posts a short Q&A at the end of all of his messages ("Q: Why is this e-mail five sentences or less? A: http://five.sentenc.es") linking to a little explanatory website he operates, where he sums up his policy.

What's wrong with this? Everything. First, writing short messages is not always easier than writing longer ones. You'll soon find yourself fighting the tool. Second, why be so damn restrictive and dogmatic? Couldn't you just strive to spend less time on answering e-mails? How about a timer? Or nothing at all, just an effort to keep it short? Maybe you'll average on five sentences, maybe you won't, but why this "one size fits all" approach?

And don't even get me started on the sociopathic explanatory link at the end. If your correspondants are insulted by your brevity, a pre-recorded explanation will only rub salt into their wounds. Guess what, you've been handled by a policy. You're not so important.

My suggestion: strive to spend less time on answering e-mails. If some of them end up too brief as a result, add this sentence at the end: "Sorry to be brief, I'm really busy."

No weblink or clever URL, though.

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Are the boring years over for the Mac?

You might think I'm nuts for saying so, and I'd really like you to put my words into the right perspective, but here is what I have to say: the history of the Mac has been a pretty boring ride lately, and I hope it will change soon. In fact, I think it will change in a matter of weeks, as Apple releases the revamped iMac.

Let's see. Over the turn of the millennium, Apple changed the Mac drastically. It simplified the Mac product matrix. It threw out a lot of technologies, and adopted some new ones. USB, FireWire, WiFi, UATA (then SATA) took over from the likes of SCSI and ADB. The floppy was killed. And perhaps most significantly, Mac OS X was born. In addition, industrial design started to matter.

And that was it. Nothing has happened ever since.

What could a true Mac watcher rejoice about in the last six years or so? New enclosures.

They have been great, they have been sexy, and yes, I have raved about many of them, just check out the Applelust archives. Apple has shown us all that computers can be beautiful. But as far as technological innovation goes, Apple's huge advances in industrial design are only skin deep.

The iMac now ships in six colors! Now in three! It now looks psychedelic! It has DVD! Now it has CD-RW! Now it looks like a sunflower! Now it's like a monitor! I'm going to swoon!

No wonder the Dark Side ridicules us, Mac fanboys.

I desperately yearn for something really new. The iSight, while unoriginal, was quite a relief, as was the Apple Remote: simple, yet greatly useful touches… And finally, hardware additions! The scrolling trackpad was also a step in the right direction.

But while Apple serves as an R&D lab for the entire software industry, its hardware is decidedly conservative. Couldn't we really use some new keys on the keyboard? All Command-something keystrokes are reserved now for some Mac OS X function. All Function keys already do something, and really, however futuristic and useful Exposé is, launching it by pressing a key that's labeled something as geeky as "F9" instantly throws you back to the days of DOS.

I desperately yearn for new gestures, new metaphors, new input devices. New hardware directions. Are we stuck forever in 1984, or what? If Apple can't deliver the future, who will?

But I think that future is just around the corner. The iPhone shows that Apple can still think outside the box. We have proof that Apple has still got it.

And while people can argue whether or not the iPhone is a Mac, its modest cousin, the Apple TV, is undeniably one, and is taking the Mac platform to places it hasn't gone before. We have a Mac that feeds content to a TV, and is operated by a remote control. To me, this is a much more significant development than yet another iMac facelift, or any transition from titanium to aluminum.

Rumors abound about the new iMac. It is said to have a redesigned keyboard, with lots of new features. Hoorray! I can't wait to see what else the revision will bring. And I have a gut feeling that Apple and the Mac will re-ignite a hardware revolution that goes beyond prettier and prettier boxes that essentially do the same thing they have been doing for decades.

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