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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Happy New Year from Mac Thought Crime

Wonder what Apple's up to…

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Adding reddit links to Blogger Beta

As a gentle reminder to your readers to help popularize your blog via reddit, you can add a reddit button to each of your posts. This will give readers a one-click opportunity to boost your posts on reddit if they're already submitted, or an easy way to submit them if they aren't. (Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.)

I haven't found any literature on how this procedure works on Blogger Beta, so I had to do a bit of poking around in the less-than-spectacular Blogger Beta documentation, as well as some experimenting. It's no rocket science, but in case you were planning to do the same, and got stuck somewhere, here's how I did it.

1. Go to the buttons page on reddit, and copy the code for the button style of your choice to your clipboard. (The one this blog uses is style 1.) Paste the code snippet into some text editor.

<script>reddit_url='[URL]'</script>
<script language="javascript" src="http://reddit.com/button.js?t=1"></script>

2. Log in to Blogger Beta, and navigate from your Dashboard to Template, then Edit HTML. Click the check box which says "Expand Widget Templates."

3. Now you'll need to edit your template. I recommend that you copy the entire template file and paste it into a text editor, so you'll be able to use Find/Replace and other text editing facilities. (Like, you can have the editor speak out the entire template file for you. It's great fun to listen to.) Good ol' TextEdit will do (if you're a Mac user), but make sure you work on a plain text file, not a rich text file. (You can switch between the two formats in the Format menu.)

It's also recommended that you save a backup copy before proceeding, just in case something goes wrong.

If you think you're done with your edits, copy and paste your template back into the browser's text field, and click on the Preview button to see if it looks fine. Don't click on Save unless it really all seems OK. (Don't expect to test links in Preview mode, though. They won't work. That's normal behavior.)

In case you really messed up, and want to revert to the original code, your backup copy comes in handy. Or, you can revert to Blogger's original version of the template, but then you'll lose all your previous hacks, if any.

4. OK, now you need to find the place where you need to paste the code. This is probably the trickiest part for most of us. The natural place for the button would be in the footer of a post. However, I placed the link at the end of the post body instead, for design considerations.

In any case, if you want to find the suitable location for your button, some elementary understanding of a Blogger Beta template is handy.

The template file usually starts with some lengthy CSS declarations. Then comes the part which instructs the Blogger engine how to lay out your blog.

This is an XML file which includes XHTML tags, as well as some proprietary tags that operate the Blogger engine, instructing it to display your contents. If you want to put the reddit button in the post body, you should look for a part in the file that says

<div class='post-body'>

This is where the post body begins. Depending on your template, various bits of code follow, and finally the <\div> closing tag marks the end of the body.

I placed the code I'd got from reddit right before that closing tag. If you want to put it in the footer instead, look for a suitable place between the <div class='post-footer'> and the <\div class='post-footer'> tags instead, but as I can't walk you down that path, be sure to test your code with the Preview feature before you commit to it by saving it.

I added a <br\> tag right before the reddit script just to make it look nicer. (Don't forget the "\" , as this is XHTML.)

5. Now comes the final trick: the reddit code contains a bit which needs to be rewritten. The part where it says "[URL]" is just a placeholder, you need to replace it with some Blogger code that yields an URL for each post. So after you've pasted the reddit code, change its first line from this:

<script>reddit_url='[URL]'</script>

to this:

<script>reddit_url='<data:post.url/>'</script>

This was the part which took me the longest to figure out, as the documentation was, again, a bit sketchy. But now I've found the right syntax, and it should work a charm for you too.

Oh, and finally, a less-than-gentle reminder to my dear readers: please be kind enough to give my posts some boost on reddit… Thank you.

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A blog, of all the things in the world...!

Years and years in the making (by which I mean "periodically wondering how cool it would be to do it"), Mac Thought Crime finally emerges as a weblog.

This came after some internal struggle. Me? Doing a blog? No way. But then a lot of things have happened since the first-ever time Mac Thought Crime was mentioned (and yes, that link does point back to the Web's Middle Ages) as a project to be launched, erm, soon. First, blogs were born as such. Then, another few years later (and still no sign of Mac Thought Crime save for a few first and mostly second-level domains containing little other than yet more "coming soon" pages), blogs started to become a legit source of information (as the link from 2002 proves, pointing to the ever-so-legit Wired Magazine).

After all, the main focus of my... blog... (OK, I'm now comfortable saying that) will be opinion pieces on all things Mac (and sometimes beyond), and what better way is there out there than a blog to post stuff like that?

So here I come now, trading in a bunch of unannounced features that will be, erm, coming soon, for the ability to start publishing stuff immediately. I might have frowned upon blogs as somewhat inferior, perhaps superficial creatures of the Web, but that is definitely no more. There are some insanely great blogs that can and will serve as a tremendous source of inspiration for yours truly (first and foremost, the inimitable, oft-updated and always spot-on Daring Fireball). So blogging is serious business, folks (OK, maybe not always).

Anyway, ladies and gentlemen... I give you... Mac Thought Crime.

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